Escape double quotes in a string

Question

Double quotes can be escaped like this:

string test = @\"He said to me, \"\"Hello World\"\". How are you?\";

But this involves adding chara

Answer 1

You're misunderstanding escaping.

The extra " characters are part of the string literal; they are interpreted by the compiler as a single ".

The actual value of your string is still He said to me , "Hello World".How are you ?, as you'll see if you print it at runtime.

Answer 2

One solution, is to add support to the csharp language so that "" isn't the only scheme used for strings.

For another string terminator to the C# language - I'm a fan of backtick in ES6.

string test = `He said to me, "Hello World". How are you?`;

But also, the doubling idea in Markdown might be better:

string test = ""He said to me, "Hello World". How are you?"";

The code does not work at the date of this post. This post is a solution where the visitors to this Q&A jump onto this csharplank ticket for C# and upvote it - https://github.com/dotnet/csharplang/discussions/3917

Answer 3

In C# you can use the backslash to put special characters to your string. For example, to put ", you need to write \". There are a lot of characters that you write using the backslash: Backslash with a number:

• \000 null
• \010 backspace
• \011 horizontal tab
• \012 new line
• \015 carriage return
• \032 substitute
• \042 double quote
• \047 single quote
• \134 backslash
• \140 grave accent

Backslash with othe character

• \a Bell (alert)
• \b Backspace
• \f Formfeed
• \n New line
• \r Carriage return
• \t Horizontal tab
• \v Vertical tab
• \' Single quotation mark
• \" Double quotation mark
• \ Backslash
• \? Literal question mark
• \ ooo ASCII character in octal notation
• \x hh ASCII character in hexadecimal notation
• \x hhhh Unicode character in hexadecimal notation if this escape sequence is used in a wide-character constant or a Unicode string literal. For example, WCHAR f = L'\x4e00' or WCHAR b[] = L"The Chinese character for one is \x4e00".

Answer 4

No.

Either use verbatim string literals as you have, or escape the " using backslash.

string test = "He said to me, \"Hello World\" . How are you?";

The string has not changed in either case - there is a single escaped " in it. This is just a way to tell C# that the character is part of the string and not a string terminator.

Answer 5

You can use backslash either way;

string str = "He said to me, \"Hello World\". How are you?";

It prints;

He said to me, "Hello World". How are you?

which is exactly same prints with;

string str = @"He said to me, ""Hello World"". How are you?";

Here is a DEMO.

" is still part of your string.

Check out Escape Sequences and String literals from MSDN.

Answer 6

Please explain your problem. You say:

But this involves adding character " to the string.

What problem is that? You can't type string foo = "Foo"bar"";, because that'll invoke a compile error. As for the adding part, in string size terms that is not true:

@"""".Length == "\"".Length == 1