JavaScript beginner troubles with quotation marks

Question

I\'m trying to learn JS from a book (Beginner JavaScript by Jeremy McPeak), but I\'m stuck with this code:

Answer 1

In Javascript (and most other languages), you write a string by putting a sequence of characters between a pair of quote characters. So a string containing abc is written as

"abc"

If you want one of the characters in the string to be a quote character, you have to escape it, so it won't be treated as the end of the string. So a string containing abc"def would be written as:

"abc\"def"

This is demonstrated in your code where it has

"\" is "

This is a string that begins with a literal quote followed by the word is.

If you want a string containing only a quote character, you need to put an escaped quote between the quotes that indicate that you're writing a string:

"\""

That's what's at the beginning of the concatenation expression in your code.

If you just wrote

\"

that would be an escaped quote. But since it's not inside quotes, it's not a string -- it's not valid syntax for anything.

In Javascript, there's another option. It allows both single and double quotes to be used to surround a string. So if you have a string containing a double quote, you can put it inside single quotes:

'"'

You don't need to escape it because the double quote doesn't end a string that begins with single quote. Conversely, if you want to put a single quote in a string, use double quotes as the delimiters:

"This is Barry's answer"