According to the docs, the builtin string encoding string_escape:

Produce[s] a string that is suitable as string literal in Python source code

...while the unicode_escape:

Produce[s] a string that is suitable as Unicode literal in Python source code

So, they should have roughly the same behaviour. BUT, they appear to treat single quotes differently:

>>> print """before '" \0 after""".encode('string-escape')
before \'" \x00 after
>>> print """before '" \0 after""".encode('unicode-escape')
before '" \x00 after

The string_escape escapes the single quote while the Unicode one does not. Is it safe to assume that I can simply:

>>> escaped = my_string.encode('unicode-escape').replace("'", "\\'")

...and get the expected behaviour?