["python","string","escaping"]
How to un-escape a backslash-escaped string?

Suppose I have a string which is a backslash-escaped version of another string. Is there an easy way, in Python, to unescape the string? I could, for example, do: >>> escaped_str = '"Hello,\\nworld!"' >>> raw_str = eval(escaped_str) >>> print raw_str Hello, world! >>> However that involves passing a (possibly untrusted) string to eval() which is a security risk. Is there a function in the standard lib which takes a string and produces a string with no security implications?
Python 2 >>> print '"Hello,\\nworld!"'.decode('string_escape') "Hello, world!"