title: Python Dealing with Newline Characters When Converting From List to String
body: <p>I am having a problem concerning newline characters and return characters. Ugh this is hard to explain for me, but I will try.</p>
  
  <p>I have data that exists in list form. The members of the list have newline characters in them such that.</p>
  
  <pre><code> example_list = ["I've always loved jumping\n\n"]
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>In order to tokenize this sentence using NLP though NLTK I need the sentence to be in a string. NLTK will ignore newline characters and other escape characters when it tokenizes according to some tests I ran and evidence from the nltk tutorial.</p>
  
  <p>The problem is when i try to convert example_list to a string i get this output</p>
  
  <pre><code> str(example_list)
   '["I\'ve always loved jumping\\n\\n"]'
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Notice that all newline characters have now become an escaped forward slash. Trying to tokenize this yields a terrible result where NLTK thinks that jumping\n\n is one big word because it thinks that the newline characters with two slashes are actually text. </p>
  
  <p>Does anyone know any tricks or good practices to ensure that newline characters never exist in my lists or that these are disregarded or not "double escaped" when converting to a string.</p>
  
  <p>Lastly, Does anyone have any suggestions on learning material relating to how python processes newline characters and how these characters interact with different datatypes and such because it is so confusing.</p>
  
  <p>Thanks a ton!</p>