title: Python split string by \n character
body: <p>I have a long string that contains many \n escape sequences that are supposed to be new line characters. To properly write this string as it were meant to be read, I thought it would be best to split the string based on the \n character and then write each string in the resulting list individually to achieve the desired effect. However, this doesn't work, it is just not splitting them correctly. Below is my code and just to be clear I have tried both \n and \n as splits because I am trying to split at a literal \n in the string. Thanks for any help.</p>
  
  <pre><code>shellreturn = subprocess.check_output(["C:\Python34\python",root.wgetdir + "\html2text.py", keyworddir + "\\" + item])
  print(shellreturn)
  shelllist = (str(shellreturn).split("\\n"))
  </code></pre>