Q:

how can i escape '\xff\xfe' to a readable string

i see a string in this code:
data[:2] == '\xff\xfe'

i don't know what '\xff\xfe' is,
so  i want to escape it ,but not successful
import cgi
print cgi.escape('\xff\xfe')#print \xff\xfe

how can i get it.
thanks

A:

'\xFF' means the byte with the hex value FF. '\xff\xfe' is a byte-order mark: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte_order_mark
You could also represent it as two separate characters but that probably won't tell you anything useful.

A:

You cannot escape or encode an invalid string.
You should understand that you are working with strings and not byte streams and there are some characters you cannot accept in them, first of them being 0x00 - and also your example that is happening to be a BOM sequence.
So if you need to include non-valid strings characters (unicode or ascii) you will have to stop using strings for this.
Take a look at PEP-0358

