What's the @ in front of a string in C#?

Question

This is a .NET question for C# (or possibly VB.net), but I am trying to figure out what\'s the difference between the following declarations:

string hello =          


        

Answer 1

It's a verbatim string literal. It means that escaping isn't applied. For instance:

string verbatim = @"foo\bar";
string regular = "foo\\bar";

Here verbatim and regular have the same contents.

It also allows multi-line contents - which can be very handy for SQL:

string select = @"
SELECT Foo
FROM Bar
WHERE Name='Baz'";

The one bit of escaping which is necessary for verbatim string literals is to get a double quote (") which you do by doubling it:

string verbatim = @"He said, ""Would you like some coffee?"" and left.";
string regular = "He said, \"Would you like some coffee?\" and left.";