CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c#string
user1283776
user1283776

Reputation: 21764

How to declare string in C# without having to escape special characters?

Is there a way to declare strings in C# without having to escape special characters?

I have searched for answers and found some string literal syntaxes that I thought would achieve what I wanted, but did not.

string lit = ""<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?""
string lit = @"<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?"

error CS1525: Invalid expression term '?'

Upvotes: 1

Views: 3533

Answers (2)

Ehsan Sajjad
Ehsan Sajjad

Reputation: 62488

inside the string literal if we need to use double quote we will still need to escape it in verbatim string too like:

string lit = @"<?xml version=""1.0"" encoding=""utf-8""?";

the value in variable will be : 

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?

Upvotes: 2

Jon Skeet
Jon Skeet

Reputation: 1499800

Is there a way to declare strings in C# without having to escape special characters?

When considering " as a special character, the answer is no.

Verbatim string literals (@"foo") avoid you having to escape backslashes and line breaks, but you still need to escape double quotes. The correct escaping for your examples would be:

string lit = "<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"utf-8\"?";
string lit = @"<?xml version=""1.0"" encoding=""utf-8""?";

I often find that for JSON and XML, in test code at least, it's simplest to use single quotes and then replace them:

string lit = "<?xml version='1.0' encoding='utf-8'?".Replace('\'', '"');

Or for XML you could just use single quotes for attributes anyway.

Upvotes: 9

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