The character sequence \012 inside the string is interpreted as an octal escape sequence. The value 012 interpreted as octal is 10 in decimal, which is the line feed (\n) character on most terminals. From the Wikipedia page: An octal escape sequence consists of \ followed by one, two, or three octal digits. The octal escape sequence ends when it either contains three octal digits already, or ...
java - Why int j = 012 giving output 10? - Stack Overflow
The results come from a PostgreSQL database, and originally had some non UTF-8 characters. To fix my problem, I used the Python .encode('utf-8') function on my text and then reinserted it into the database. However, now my text has "\012" written through it. Is there anything I can do to the text when I retrieve it to format this away?