How can I escape latex code received through user input?

Asked 2011-08-31T20:12:30.053

I read in a string from a GUI textbox entered by the user and process it through pandoc. The string contains latex directives for math which have backslash characters. I want to send in the string as a raw string to pandoc for processing. But something like "\theta" becomes a tab and "heta".

How can I convert a string literal that contains backslash characters to a raw string...?

Edit:

Thanks develerx, flying sheep and unutbu. But none of the solutions seem to help me. The reason is that there are other backslashed-characters which do not have any effect in python but do have a meaning in latex.

For example '\lambda'. All the methods suggested produce

\\lambda

which does not go through in latex processing -- it should remain as \lambda.

Another edit:

If i can get this work, i think i should be through. @Mark: All three methods give answers that i dont desire.

a='\nu + \lambda + \theta'; 
b=a.replace(r"\\",r"\\\\"); 
c='%r' %a; 
d=a.encode('string_escape');
print a

u + \lambda +   heta
print b

u + \lambda +   heta
print c
'\nu + \\lambda + \theta'
print d
\nu + \\lambda + \theta

python string text

Edit Report

2 Answers

Python’s raw strings are just a way to tell the Python interpreter that it should interpret backslashes as literal slashes. If you read strings entered by the user, they are already past the point where they could have been raw. Also, user input is most likely read in literally, i.e. “raw”.

This means the interpreting happens somewhere else. But if you know that it happens, why not escape the backslashes for whatever is interpreting it?

s = s.replace("\\", "\\\\")

(Note that you can't do r"\" as “a raw string cannot end in a single backslash”, but I could have used r"\\" as well for the second argument.)

If that doesn’t work, your user input is for some arcane reason interpreting the backslashes, so you’ll need a way to tell it to stop that.

answered 2011-08-31T20:23:22.857

a='\nu + \lambda + \theta'
d=a.encode('string_escape').replace('\\\\','\\')
print(d)
# \nu + \lambda + \theta

This shows that there is a single backslash before the n, l and t:

print(list(d))
# ['\\', 'n', 'u', ' ', '+', ' ', '\\', 'l', 'a', 'm', 'b', 'd', 'a', ' ', '+', ' ', '\\', 't', 'h', 'e', 't', 'a']

There is something funky going on with your GUI. Here is a simple example of grabbing some user input through a Tkinter.Entry. Notice that the text retrieved only has a single backslash before the n, l, and t. Thus no extra processing should be necessary:

import Tkinter as tk

def callback():
    print(list(text.get()))

root = tk.Tk()
root.config()

b = tk.Button(root, text="get", width=10, command=callback)

text=tk.StringVar()

entry = tk.Entry(root,textvariable=text)
b.pack(padx=5, pady=5)
entry.pack(padx=5, pady=5)
root.mainloop()

If you type \nu + \lambda + \theta into the Entry box, the console will (correctly) print:

['\\', 'n', 'u', ' ', '+', ' ', '\\', 'l', 'a', 'm', 'b', 'd', 'a', ' ', '+', ' ', '\\', 't', 'h', 'e', 't', 'a']

If your GUI is not returning similar results (as your post seems to suggest), then I'd recommend looking into fixing the GUI problem, rather than mucking around with string_escape and string replace.

answered 2011-08-31T20:34:09.573

How can I escape latex code received through user input?

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