Escape sequences

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Escape sequences are used to represent certain special characters within string literals and character literals.

The following escape sequences are available (extra escape sequences may be provided with implementation-defined semantics):

Escape
sequence 		Description Representation
\' single quote byte 0x27 in ASCII encoding
\" double quote byte 0x22 in ASCII encoding
\? question mark byte 0x3f in ASCII encoding
\\ backslash byte 0x5c in ASCII encoding
\a audible bell byte 0x07 in ASCII encoding
\b backspace byte 0x08 in ASCII encoding
\f form feed - new page byte 0x0c in ASCII encoding
\n line feed - new line byte 0x0a in ASCII encoding
\r carriage return byte 0x0d in ASCII encoding
\t horizontal tab byte 0x09 in ASCII encoding
\v vertical tab byte 0x0b in ASCII encoding
\nnn arbitrary octal value byte nnn
\xnn arbitrary hexadecimal value byte nn
\unnnn universal character name
(arbitrary Unicode value);
may result in several characters 		code point U+nnnn
\Unnnnnnnn universal character name
(arbitrary Unicode value);
may result in several characters 		code point U+nnnnnnnn

Notes

Of the octal escape sequences, \0 is the most useful because it represents the terminating null character in null-terminated strings.

The new-line character \n has special meaning when used in text mode I/O: it is converted to the OS-specific newline byte or byte sequence.

Octal escape sequences have a limit of three octal digits, but terminate at the first character that is not a valid octal digit if encountered sooner.

Hexadecimal escape sequences have no length limit and terminate at the first character that is not a valid hexadecimal digit. If the value represented by a single hexadecimal escape sequence does not fit the range of values represented by the character type used in this string literal (char, char16_t, char32_t, or wchar_t), the result is unspecified.

A universal character name in a narrow string literal or a 16-bit string literal may map to more than one character, e.g. \U0001f34c is 4 char code units in UTF-8 (\xF0\x9F\x8D\x8C) and 2 char16_t code units in UTF-16 (\uD83C\uDF4C)).

The question mark escape sequence \? is used to prevent trigraphs from being interpreted inside string literals: a string such as "??/" is compiled as "\", but if the second question mark is escaped, as in "?\?/", it becomes "??/"

Example

Run this code
#include <cstdio>
 
int main()
{
    std::printf("This\nis\na\ntest\n\nShe said, \"How are you?\"\n");
}

Output: 

This
is
a
test
 
She said, "How are you?"

See also

C documentation for Escape sequence
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