title: Python 3: is there any need of using unicode_escape encoding?
body: <p><a href="https://docs.python.org/3/library/codecs.html#python-specific-encodings" rel="nofollow noreferrer">This link</a> lists out some python specific encodings.</p>
  
  <p>One of the encoding is "unicode_escape".</p>
  
  <p>I am just trying to figure out, is this special encoding really needed?</p>
  
  <pre><code>&gt;&gt;&gt; l = r'C:\Users\userx\toot'
  &gt;&gt;&gt; l
  'C:\\Users\\userx\\toot'
  &gt;&gt;&gt; l.encode('unicode_escape').decode()
  'C:\\\\Users\\\\userx\\\\toot'
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>If you could see above, 'l' which is a unicode object, has already taken care of escaping the backslashes. Converting it to "unicode_escape" encoding adds one more set of escaped backslashes which doesn't make any sense to me.</p>
  
  <p>Questions:</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li>Is "unicode_escape" encoding really needed?</li>
  <li>why did "unicode_escape" added one more sets of backslashes above?</li>
  </ol>