Escape sequences allow you to include special characters in strings. To do this, simply add a backslash (\) before the character you want to escape.

For example, imagine you initialized a string with single quotes:

s = 'Hey, whats up?'
print(s)

Output:

Hey, whats up?

But if you include an apostrophe without escaping it, then you will get an error:

s = 'Hey, what's up?'
print(s)

Output:

  File "main.py", line 1
    s = 'Hey, what's up?'
                   ^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax

To fix this, just escape the apostrophe:

s = 'Hey, what\'s up?'
print(s)

To add newlines to your string, use \n:

print("Multiline strings\ncan be created\nusing escape sequences.")

Output:

Multiline strings
can be created
using escape sequences.

An important thing to remember is that, if you want to include a backslash character in a string, you will need to escape that. For example, if you want to print a directory path in Windows, you'll need to escape each backslash in the string:

print("C:\\Users\\Pat\\Desktop")

Output:

C:\Users\Pat\Desktop

Raw strings

A raw string can be used by prefixing the string with r or R, which allows for backslashes to be included without the need to escape them. For example:

print(r"Backslashes \ don't need to be escaped in raw strings.")

Output:

Backslashes \ don't need to be escaped in raw strings.

But keep in mind that unescaped backslashes at the end of a raw string will cause and error:

print(r"There's an unescaped backslash at the end of this string\")

Output:

  File "main.py", line 1
    print(r"There's an unescaped backslash at the end of this string\")
                                                                      ^
SyntaxError: EOL while scanning string literal

Common escape sequences

A full list of escape sequences can be found here in the Python docs.