[Swift-user] backslash quoting in strings

Ben Clifford benc at hawaga.org.uk
Sat Nov 15 19:42:28 CST 2008


On Sat, 15 Nov 2008, Michael Wilde wrote:

> It seems from experimentation that backslash quoting changed at some point (or
> the user guide and tutorial are wrong): the \1 needed in the transform arg of
> the regexp_mapper needs to be \\1 - at least it seems this way from
> experimentation with trace().

Yes, that changed between v0.4 and v0.5.

This is an intended behaviour, to facilitate putting in \" characters.

> Its also odd trace() takes \t and \n but echoes them just like that, with the
> backslashes printing.

I don't think has had any strong intention about that should behave.

On looking at the parser, \ followed by one of n r t b f " \ will be 
passed through, with apparently only the quotes having some special 
behaviour and the others passing through unmodified. Other \ sequences, 
such as \g, will cause a parser error.

This could be tidied up sometime. File a bug for it.

-- 




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