why <div class=\"gn_topmenulist\"> ? what is the \

Question

The background is that I use the scrapy to crawl weibo.com,but I find the the tags in html crawled includes '\" looks like the title: ,that makes I can not use xpath to get the information, so why the \ appears.

Answer 1

In plain English: String literals can be enclosed in matching single quotes (') or double quotes ("). They can also be enclosed in matching groups of three single or double quotes (these are generally referred to as triple-quoted strings). The backslash (\) character is used to escape characters that otherwise have a special meaning, such as newline, backslash itself, or the quote character.

Python Reference Manual:String literals

Answer 2

The backslash is used to escape the quotation marks, because otherwise the first quotation mark would end the string, hence the end of the output, so the rest might not appear, or would break if you're using the output in a program.