The art of escaping

Matthias Reuter — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 08:47:49 +0000

Escaping is the art of transforming a text into a transport format from which it can be extracted again without any modification.

That's something every developer does - to a certain level. For example take the sentence

Matthias says: "I love Javascript".

Now put this sentence in a Java source code:

String s = "Matthias says: "I love Javascript".";

If you don't complain about this, your compiler will. In Java (any many other programming languages) the quotation mark " has a special meaning, it defines a string. So if you have a string containing the quotation mark, you need to escape it:

String s = "Matthias says: \"I love Javascript\".";

If you print out s, the original text is shown:

System.out.print(s); // Matthias says: "I love Javascript".

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united-coders.com - HTML

The art of escaping