Prevent inserting escape characters

[Jimbo]

Seemingly out of nowhere, mysqldb has been inserting escape characters
(backslash specifically) in my queries.

This is in the database when I query it directly:

\:+\s(+.+.+.+)\s+\:

Here is the same field when queried using mysqldb:

\:+\s(+\.+\.+\.+)\s+\:

What gives???

[Jimbo]

Nevermind, when using this in my regular expression, (r"%s" % variable_name)
strips the backslashes.