title: Parsing JSON using Pandas - issue with additional \ escape characters
body: <p>I'm downloading files from S3 that contains JSON (like) data which I intend to parse into a Pandas dataframe using <code>pd.read_json</code>. </p>
  
  <p>My problem is that the files dumped into the S3 bucket use an 'octal escape' formatting for non english characters but Python/Pandas objects to the fact that an escape for the <code>\</code> character is also included. </p>
  
  <p>An example would be the string: <code>"destination":"Provence-Alpes-C\\303\\264te d\'Azur"</code></p>
  
  <p>Which prints as:</p>
  
  <p><a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/mcrR7.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/mcrR7.png" alt="enter image description here"></a></p>
  
  <p>If I manually remove one of the <code>\</code> characters then Python happily interprets the string and it prints as:</p>
  
  <p><a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/ey0ej.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/ey0ej.png" alt="enter image description here"></a></p>
  
  <p>There is some good stuff in this <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5186839/python-replace-with" title="string">thread</a> and although <code>.decode('string_escape')</code> works well on an individual snippet, when its part of the much longer string comprising thousands of records then it doesn't work.</p>
  
  <p>I believe that I need a clever way to replace the <code>\\</code> with <code>\</code> but for well documented reasons, <code>.replace('\\', '\')</code> doesn't work. </p>
  
  <p>In order to get the files to work at all I used a regex to remove all <code>\</code> followed by a number: <code>re.sub(r'\\(?=[0-9])', '', g)</code> - I'm thinking that an adaptation of this might be the way forward but the number needs to be dynamic as I don't know what it will be (i.e. using <code>\3</code> and <code>\2</code> for the example above isn't going to work')</p>
  
  <p>Help appreciated.</p>