What is the backslash character

Question

What is the string literal    backslash  What does it do  I have thought about it but I do not understand it  I also read it on wikipedia  When I try to print the following   System out println  Mango    Nightangle      the output is  Mango   Nightangle  What is the significance of this string literal

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Imagine you are designing a programming language  You decide that Strings are enclosed in quotes   Apple    Then you hit your first snag  how to represent quotation marks since you ve already used them   Just out of convention you decide to use    to represent quotation marks  Then you have a second problem  how to represent     Again  out of convention you decide to use    instead  Thankfully  the process ends there and this is sufficient  You can also use what is called an escape sequence to represent other characters such as the carriage return   n

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The   on it s own is used to escape special characters  such as  n  new line    t  tabulation       quotes  when typing these specific values in a System out println   statement   Thus  if you want to print a backslash     you can t have it on it s own since the compiler will be expecting a special character  such as the ones above   Thus  to print a backslash you need to escape it  since itself is also one of these special characters  thus     yields

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It is used to escape special characters and print them as is   E g  to print a double quote which is used to enclose strings  you need to escape it using the backslash character   e g   System out println  printing   this   in quotes      outputs  printing  this  in quotes

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If double backslash looks weird to you  C  also allows verbatim string literals where the escaping is not required   Console WriteLine   Mango   Nightangle      Don t you just wish Java had something like this  -

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is used for escape sequences in programming languages    n prints a newline    prints a backslash    prints    t prints a tabulator  b moves the cursor one back

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is used as for escape sequence in many programming languages  including Java    If you want to    go to next line then use  n or  r   for tab use  t  likewise to print a   or   which are special in string literal you have to escape it with another   which gives us    and

[java] What is the backslash character (\\)?

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