Retrieving escaped characters using PyMongo

Working with Data Drivers
1

I’m using pymongo to access MongoDB from python.

I have a collection with a document that include escaped quotes:

{
    "_id" : ObjectId("5e57d89d5a7f537828c12a53"),
    "field" : "my \"string\" with escaped chars"
}

However ,when I retrieve the document like this:

doc = collection.find_one({})
print(doc)

I get this:

{'_id': ObjectId('5e57d89d5a7f537828c12a53'), 'field': 'my "string" with escaped chars'}

which is not what I want as the escaped quotes have disappeared.

What should I do to retrieve the document as is in the database, that is, with the escaped quotes?

Thanks

2

Any reason why you want the backslash? In principle you use the backslash in your code because you want the quotes. I am not sure in python but in some other languages you put 3 backslashes. The first one escapes the second one and the third escape the quotes.

3

When you use it, why don’t you define your string as raw using r’text’? I should keep escape characters.

4

Thanks @steevej and @coderkid.

I do need the backslashes. Actually, the documents I want to retrieve are much more complicated than
the simple example I gave, and they are in a database that I cannot modify.

The documents are correctly retrieved by a Java application, but for some reason pymongo “unescapes” the backslashes.

5

Ok, so I’ve found what the problem was. It’s the “print” bit, that is not displaying the backslashes. My code was actually doing a return str(doc) as it was a REST API server. The str was then removing the backslashes.

I’ve changed that for return json.dumps(doc) and it keeps them.

So problem solved!

2 Likes