I'm trying to write a python tool that will read a logfile and process it

One thing it should do is use the paths listed in the logfile (it's a logfile for a backup tool)

/Volumes/Live_Jobs/Live_Jobs/*SCANS\ and\ LE\ Docs/_LE_PROOFS_DOCS/JEM_lj/JEM/0002_OXO_CorkScrew/3\ Delivery/GG_Double\ Lever\ Waiters\ Corkscrew_072613_Mike_RETOUCHED/gg_3110200_2_V3_Final.tif

Unfortunately the paths that I'm provided with aren't appropriately escaped and I've had trouble properly escaping in python. Perhaps python isn't the best tool for this, but I like it's flexibility - it will allow me to extend whatever I write

Using the regex escape function escapes too many characters, pipes.quote method doesn't escape the spaces, and if I use a regex to replace ' ' with '\ ' I end up getting

/Volumes/Live_Jobs/Live_Jobs/*SCANS\\ and\\ LE\\ Docs/_LE_PROOFS_DOCS/JEM_lj/JEM/0002_OXO_CorkScrew/3\\ Delivery/GG_Double\\ Lever\\ Waiters\\ Corkscrew_072613_Mike_RETOUCHED/gg_3110200_2_V3_Final.tif

which are double escaped and wont pass to python functions like os.path.getsize().

What am I doing wrong??

If you're reading paths out of a file, and passing them to functions like os.path.getsize, you don't need to escape them. For example:

>>> with open('name with spaces', 'w') as f:
...     f.write('abc\n')
>>> os.path.getsize('name with spaces')
4

In fact, there are only a handful of functions in Python that need spaces escaped, either because they're passing a string to the shell (like os.system) or because they're trying to do shell-like parsing on your behalf (like subprocess.foo with an arg string instead of an arg list).

So, let's say logfile.txt looks like this:

/Volumes/My Drive/My Scans/Batch 1/foo bar.tif
/Volumes/My Drive/My Scans/Batch 1/spam eggs.tif
/Volumes/My Drive/My Scans/Batch 2/another long name.tif

… then something like this will work fine:

with open('logfile.txt') as logf:for line in logf:with open(line.rstrip()) as f:do_something_with_tiff_file(f)

Noticing those * characters in your example, if these are glob patterns, that's fine too:

with open('logfile.txt') as logf:for line in logf:for path in glob.glob(line.rstrip()):with open(path) as f:do_something_with_tiff_file(f)

If your problem is the exact opposite of what you described, and the file is full of strings that are escaped, and you want to unescape them, decode('string_escape') will undo Python-style escaping, and there are different functions to undo different kinds of escaping, but without knowing what kind of escaping you want to undo it's hard to say which function you want…