How to put backslash escape sequence into an f-string

If you want to write something like:

"{}MESSAGE{}".format("\t"*15, "\t"*15)

but using f-strings, you hit the issue that you cannot have a backslash inside an f-string expression.

Instead you should assign the tab character to a variable and then use that:

tab = '\t' * 15
f"{tab}MESSAGE{tab}"

Update: PEP 701, implemented in Python 3.12 (October 2023), removes this restriction entirely — backslashes (and even same-type nested quotes) are now legal directly inside f-string expression braces. On Python 3.12+ you can write f"{'\t' * 15}MESSAGE{'\t' * 15}" directly. The workaround above is still needed if you’re on Python 3.11 or earlier.

Via SO.