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In computer science, an escape sequence is a combination of characters that has a meaning other than the literal characters contained therein; it is marked by one or more preceding (and possibly terminating) characters. In C and many derivative programming languages, a string escape sequence is a series of two or more characters, starting with a backslash . Note that in C a backslash immediately followed by a newline does not constitute an escape sequence, but splices physical source lines into logical ones in the second translation phase, whereas string escape sequences are converted in the fifth translation phase. To represent the backslash character itself, \ can be used, whereby the first backslash indicates an escape and the second specifies that a backslash is being escaped. A character may be escaped in multiple different ways. Assuming ASCII encoding, the escape sequences \x5c (hexadecimal), \, \134 (octal) and \x5C all encode the same character: the backslash . For devices that respond to ANSI escape sequences, the combination of three or more characters beginning with the ASCII "escape" character (decimal character code 27) followed by the left-bracket character [ (decimal character code 91) defines an escape sequence. When directed this series of characters is used to change the state of computers and their attached peripheral devices, rather than to be displayed or printed as regular data bytes would be, these are also known as control sequences, reflecting their use in device control, beginning with the Control Sequence Initiator - originally the "escape character" ASCII code - character 27 (decimal) - often written "Esc" on keycaps. With the introduction of ANSI terminals most escape sequences began with the two characters "ESC" then "[" or a specially-allocated CSI character with a code 155 (decimal). Not all control sequences used an escape character; for example: modem control sequences used by AT/Hayes-compatible modems Data General terminal control sequences, but they often were still called escape sequences, and the very common use of "escaping" special characters in programming languages and command-line parameters today often use the "backslash" character to begin the sequence.

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String literal

A string literal or anonymous string is a literal for a string value in the source code of a computer program. Modern programming languages commonly use a quoted sequence of characters, formally "bracketed delimiters", as in x = "foo", where "foo" is a string literal with value foo. Methods such as escape sequences can be used to avoid the problem of delimiter collision (issues with brackets) and allow the delimiters to be embedded in a string. There are many alternate notations for specifying string literals especially in complicated cases.

Newline

A newline (frequently called line ending, end of line (EOL), next line (NEL) or line break) is a control character or sequence of control characters in character encoding specifications such as ASCII, EBCDIC, Unicode, etc. This character, or a sequence of characters, is used to signify the end of a and the start of a new one. In the mid-1800s, long before the advent of teleprinters and teletype machines, Morse code operators or telegraphists invented and used Morse code prosigns to encode white space text formatting in formal written text messages.

Escape character

In computing and telecommunication, an escape character is a character that invokes an alternative interpretation on the following characters in a character sequence. An escape character is a particular case of metacharacters. Generally, the judgement of whether something is an escape character or not depends on the context. In the telecommunications field, escape characters are used to indicate that the following characters are encoded differently.

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ELSEVIER SCIENCE SA2023

Inducing Meaningful Units from Character Sequences with Slot Attention

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Characters do not convey meaning, but sequences of characters do. We propose an unsupervised distributional method to learn the abstract meaning-bearing units in a sequence of characters. Rather than segmenting the sequence, this model discovers continuous ...

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