You need to double the backslash:
'/-\\'
as a single backslash has special meaning in a Python string as the start of an escape sequence. A double \\
results in the string containing a single backslash:
>>> print '/-\\'
/-\
If the backslash is not the last character in the string, you could use a r''
raw string as well:
>>> print r'\-/'
\-/