Concept

Metacharacter

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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.

Backslash

The backslash is a typographical mark used mainly in computing and mathematics. It is the of the common slash . It is a relatively recent mark, first documented in the 1930s. It is sometimes called a hack, whack, escape (from C/UNIX), reverse slash, slosh, downwhack, backslant, backwhack, bash, reverse slant, reverse solidus, and reversed virgule. efforts to identify either the origin of this character or its purpose before the 1960s have not been successful.

Delimiter

A delimiter is a sequence of one or more characters for specifying the boundary between separate, independent regions in plain text, mathematical expressions or other data streams. An example of a delimiter is the comma character, which acts as a field delimiter in a sequence of comma-separated values. Another example of a delimiter is the time gap used to separate letters and words in the transmission of Morse code. In mathematics, delimiters are often used to specify the scope of an operation, and can occur both as isolated symbols (e.

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.