In Python, is it possible to escape newline characters when printing a string?

Just encode it with the 'string_escape' codec.

>>> print "foo\nbar".encode('string_escape')
foo\nbar

In python3, 'string_escape' has become unicode_escape. Additionally, we need to be a little more careful about bytes/unicode so it involves a decoding after the encoding:

>>> print("foo\nbar".encode("unicode_escape").decode("utf-8"))

unicode_escape reference