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The backslash (\) escape character typically provides two ways to include double-quotes inside a string literal, either by modifying the meaning of the double-quote character embedded in the string (\" becomes "), or by modifying the meaning of a sequence of characters including the hexadecimal value of a double-quote character (\x22 becomes ").
In C, strings are normally represented as a character array rather than an actual string data type. The fact a string is really an array of characters means that referring to a string would mean referring to the first element in an array. Hence in C, the following is a legitimate example of brace notation:
Furthermore, (unlike in the literature example), the third-level nested quote must be escaped in order not to conflict with either the first- or second-level quote delimiters. This is true regardless of alternating-symbol encapsulation. Every level after the third level must be recursively escaped for all the levels of quotes in which it is ...
Non-interpolated strings may also escape sequences, in which case they are termed a raw string, though in other cases this is separate, yielding three classes of raw string, non-interpolated (but escaped) string, interpolated (and escaped) string. For example, in Unix shells, single-quoted strings are raw, while double-quoted strings are ...
For instance, inside a C string literal the sequence \n produces a newline byte instead of an 'n', and the sequence \" produces an actual double quote rather than the special meaning of the double quote ending the string. An actual backslash is produced by a double backslash \\.
One of the oldest examples is in shell scripts, where single quotes indicate a raw string or "literal string", while double quotes have escape sequences and variable interpolation. For example, in Python , raw strings are preceded by an r or R – compare 'C:\\Windows' with r'C:\Windows' (though, a Python raw string cannot end in an odd number ...
However, the use of apostrophe for opening quotes, the need on some typewriters to overprint apostrophe and period to get an exclamation mark, and the lack of a mirrored double-quote character tended to change the apostrophe to the modern "typewriter" design that is vertical. Unicode now provides separate characters for opening and closing quotes.
Comma- and space-separated formats often suffer from this problem, since in many contexts those characters are legitimate parts of a data field. Most such files avoid delimiter collision either by surrounding all data fields in double quotes, or only quoting those data fields that contain the delimiter character.