How to write string literals in python without having to escape them?

There is no such thing. It looks like you want something like "here documents" in Perl and the shells, but Python doesn't have that.

Using raw strings or multiline strings only means that there are fewer things to worry about. If you use a raw string then you still have to work around a terminal "\" and with any string solution you'll have to worry about the closing ", ', ''' or """ if it is included in your data.

That is, there's no way to have the string

 '   ''' """  " \

properly stored in any Python string literal without internal escaping of some sort.

If you're dealing with very large strings, specifically multiline strings, be aware of the triple-quote syntax:

a = r"""This is a multiline string
with more than one line
in the source code."""

Raw string literals:

>>> r'abc\dev\t'
'abc\\dev\\t'

You will find Python's string literal documentation here:

http://docs.python.org/tutorial/introduction.html#strings

and here:

http://docs.python.org/reference/lexical_analysis.html#literals

The simplest example would be using the 'r' prefix:

ss = r'Hello\nWorld'
print(ss)
Hello\nWorld