Comment 23 for bug 710410

One possible approach would be to store the repr of the string. This will escape quotes and so avoids the problem. You then use the "string_escape" codec to unescape again.

This would also escape newlines, so would turn strings into a single line. If you still want them to be human readable then you could manually replace "\n" with a newline in the escaped string and reverse this before unescaping.

e.g. to write:

    value = repr(the_real_value).replace('\\n', '\n')

and to read:

    the_real_value = value.replace('\n', '\\n').decode('string_escape')