String to File Path

[creedX]

I am trying to create a file path from a string using os.path.normpath, however, I need a double \ at the beginning and this function doesn't allow this (from what I understand). Inside the pd.read_excel function I need the following: r'\\srpx\Folder\Data.xls'

Here is the code that is not working:

import os
import pandas as pd

excel_string = str("r'\\srpx\Folder\Data.xls'")
excel_file = os.path.normpath(excel_string)

pd.read_excel(excel_file)

By the way, this works perfectly:

pd.read_excel(r'\\srpx\Folder\Data.xls')