title: How to split "\t" in a string to two separate characters as "\" and "t"? (How to split Escape Sequence?)
body: <p>I am trying to split a string in python into a list of characters. I know that there are a lot of ways to do this in python, but I have a case where those methods don't give me the desired results. </p>
  
  <p>The problem happens when I have special characters like '\t' that is explicitly written in the string (and I don't mean the real tab).</p>
  
  <p>Example:</p>
  
  <pre><code>string = "    Hello \t World."
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>the output I need is:</p>
  
  <pre><code>list_of_chars = [' ', ' ', ' ', ' ', 'H', 'e', 'l', 'l', 'o', ' ', '\', 't', ' ', 'W', 'o', 'r', 'l', 'd', '.']
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>but when I use the methods that are given in <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4978787/how-to-split-a-string-into-array-of-characters">this question</a>, I get a list that contains '/t' as whole string - not separated. </p>
  
  <p>Example:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&gt; list(string)
  &gt; ['H', 'e', 'l', 'l', 'o', 'w', ' ', '\t', ' ', 'W', 'o', 'r', 'l', 'd', '.']
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I want to know why this happens and how to get what I want.</p>