Answer by Jonathan Feenstra for Why is the syntax different when locating two files of the same type, in the same directory?

The backslash ('\') is the escape character for strings in Python. '\u' starts a 16-bit hex value Unicode escape for the next four characters. You could use a raw string r"login\usernames.txt" or double backslashes "login\\usernames.txt" instead, but using normal slashes ('/') is recommended since this also works on Linux unlike backslashes.