ignore escape sequence c++

Question

I have tried searching google but could not find answer, can anyone tell that how to ignore escape character stored in string . I am using an array which holds different characters like this

string str[]={"| | / / ||","| |/ / ||", "| | ( \ \ \ \`_."}

Error message from compiler:

"unknown escape sequence" at

Answer 1

As @Zac has already pointed out, you can escape the \\ to avoid the problem. Another way you may find cleaner ¹ would be to use raw string literals:

string str[]={R"(| | / / ||)",R"(| |/ / ||)", R"(| | ( \ \ \ \`_.)"};

Since it's not apparent from that sample, I'll point out one additional detail: if your strings might contain a ) character, you can add more delimiters before the opening parenthesis, that also have to be matched next to the closing parenthesis, something like this:

string s = R"!(This (might be) an MS-DOS path\to\a\string)!";

Edit: Oh, one other minor detail: a raw string literal produces the same type of result as a normal string literal. You can intermix the two freely. For example, I could have left the first two literals above as normal literals, and only made the third one raw, since it's the only one that contains a backslash. For initializing an array (or other collections), I prefer to make them all raw if any of them is going to be, but that's strictly personal preference for the sake of consistency, not something the language requires.

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^{1. Just in case: this is new with C++ 11, so if you're using an older compiler, this may not be supported.}

Answer 2

You must escape the \\ character. Your string would look like this:

string str[]={"| | / / ||", "| |/ / ||", "| | ( \\ \\ \\ \\`_."};

In C++ (and most other C-based langauges), \\ is used to indicate an escape character (eg \\r , \\n , \\t , etc). If you want to have an actual "\\" character in your string, you must escape it: \\\\ .