Strings and Characters
In C#, characters are 16 bit Unicode characters. This means that the old method of one byte = one character no longer holds. This is quiet a change if you're used to the old way of treating characters and bytes as more or less interchangeable. They are the same size as 16 bit ints - (i.e. shorts or ushorts) but the compiler will complain if you try to use them directly. That's what type-strictness is all about.Characters are declared inside single quotes e.g. char z='Z'. Remember it's double quotes for strings "like this", single quotes for 'a' char.
Declaring Special Characters C# continues the tradition (in C, C++ etc) of using backslashes \ to escape special characters. Because " is used to delimit strings (and ' for individual characters) if you wish to include a single quote in a string you have to use \' and \" for a double quote. File paths have the problem that to include a backslash you also have to double it e.g . "c:\\folder\\folder2\\file.txt". Other characters that get the same treatment include a terminating zero (\0), Linefeed \n, Carriage Return \r and tab \t plus a few others.
This list shows the defined escape sequences
- Sequence - Value - Name
- \' 0x0027 Single quote
- \" 0x0022 Double quote
- \\ 0x005C Backslash
- \0 0x0000 Null
- \a 0x0007 Alert
- \b 0x0008 Backspace
- \f 0x000C Form feed
- \n 0x000A New line
- \r 0x000D Carriage return
- \t 0x0009 Horizontal tab
- \U \Unnnnnnnn Unicode escape sequence for surrogate pairs.
- \u \u0043 Unicode escape sequence ( "C" )
- \v Vertical tab 0x000B
- \x \x0044 Unicode escape sequence similar to "\u" except with variable length. ( "D" )
On the next page Still more about Strings and Chars
