Checking a python string for escaped characters

Question

I'm trying to check if a string in python contains escaped characters. The simplest way to do this is to set a list of escaped characters, then check if any element in the list is in the string:

s = "A & B"
escaped_chars = ["&",
     """,
     "'",
     ">"]

for char in escaped_chars:
    if char in s:
        print "escape char '{0}' found in string '{1}'".format(char, s)

Is there a better way of doing this?

Answer 1

You can use regular expression (See also re module documentation):

>>> s = "A & B"
>>> import re
>>> matched = re.search(r'&\w+;', s)
>>> if matched:
...     print "escape char '{0}' found in string '{1}'".format(matched.group(), s)
... 
escape char '&' found in string 'A & B'

• &, ; matches &, ; literally.
• \w matches word character (alphabet, digits, _).
• \w+ matches one or more word characters.