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In C and many derivative programming languages, a string escape sequence is a series of two or more characters, starting with a backslash \. [3]Note that in C a backslash immediately followed by a newline does not constitute an escape sequence, but splices physical source lines into logical ones in the second translation phase, whereas string escape sequences are converted in the fifth ...
An escape sequence starts with a backslash (\) called the escape character and subsequent characters define the meaning of the escape sequence. For example, \n denotes a newline character. The same or similar escape sequences are used in other, related languages such C++ , C# , Java and PHP .
The slash is also used as the default regular expression delimiter, so to be used literally in the expression, it must be escaped with a backslash \, leading to frequent escaped slashes represented as \/. If doubled, as in URLs, this yields \/\/ for an escaped //.
Generally, an escape character is not a particular case of (device) control characters, nor vice versa.If we define control characters as non-graphic, or as having a special meaning for an output device (e.g. printer or text terminal) then any escape character for this device is a control one.
This is useful when the regular expression contains instances of the more common forward slash (/) delimiter; using a vertical bar eliminates the need to escape all instances of the forward slash. However, this makes the bar unusable as the regular expression "alternative" operator.
Escape sequences are not always pretty or easy to use, so many compilers also offer other means of solving the common problems. Escape sequences, however, solve every delimiter problem and most compilers interpret escape sequences. When an escape character is inside a string literal, it means "this is the start of the escape sequence".
A path containing forward slashes often needs to be surrounded by double quotes to disambiguate it from command-line switches. note: CD does not work this way: CD "[drive letter]:/Program Files" will only work from the root ([drive letter]:\) directory. This appears to treat all forward slashes the same as .\. [citation needed]
For example, forward slash characters are used to separate different parts of a URL (or, more generally, a URI). Unreserved characters have no such meanings. Using percent-encoding, reserved characters are represented using special character sequences.