Escape Sequences

Before we move on from strings, we should take a moment to look at something called escape sequences. We won't be using these in the cat food store, but you'll definitely need to use them in other programs.

• Sometimes, we need characters in a string that are hard to represent in program code.
• The first line of code is supposed to print a string that includes a newline character, but we get a "Newline in constant" error when we try to run the code.
• We want the "new paragraph" line to include a tab character to indent some text, but when I pressed the Tab key, my editor inserted space characters instead.
• And we're getting more errors from the line that includes a quotation. It's supposed to be a single string that contains double quote marks, but what we wind up with is a a string containing "He said, ", code referring to a nonexistent value named Whoa, and a second, empty string at the end.

    static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        Console.WriteLine("first line
second line");
        Console.WriteLine("  new paragraph");
        Console.WriteLine("He said, "Whoa."");
    }

Escape sequences let you include characters in strings that might otherwise be hard to represent in code.

Newline: \n

skips to a
new line

Tab: \t

    Indents text

Double-quotes: \"

Inserts "double quotes"

Backslash: \\

Inserts a \ backslash

• Let's update the previous program to use escape sequences for the hard-to-represent characters.

    static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        Console.WriteLine("first line\nsecond line");
        Console.WriteLine("\tnew paragraph");
        Console.WriteLine("He said, \"Whoa.\"");
        Console.WriteLine("A backslash: \\");
    }