Using escape sequence at runtime with C++

Question

I am quiet new with C++ and I need to read an input from a MSVC++ text-field and write it to a file. I need to write \\n as a new line to the file and not as \\n .

After some researching I found that escape characters only work at compile-time. Is it possible for me to use it on run-time. I am only using C++ for this task.

Answer 1

I might write this a bit differently if I were doing it in C++ today (I wrote this in C around 20 years ago), but it might at least provide a little inspiration:

/*
** Public Domain by Jerry Coffin.
**
** Interprets a string in a manner similar to that the compiler
** does string literals in a program.  All escape sequences are
** longer than their translated equivalant, so the string is
** translated in place and either remains the same length or
** becomes shorter.
*/

#include <string.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include "snip_str.h"

char *translate(char *string)
{
      char *here=string;
      size_t len=strlen(string);
      int num;
      int numlen;

      while (NULL!=(here=strchr(here,'\\')))
      {
            numlen=1;
            switch (here[1])
            {
            case '\\':
                  break;

            case 'r':
                  *here = '\r';
                  break;

            case 'n':
                  *here = '\n';
                  break;

            case 't':
                  *here = '\t';
                  break;

            case 'v':
                  *here = '\v';
                  break;

            case 'a':
                  *here = '\a';
                  break;

            case '0':
            case '1':
            case '2':
            case '3':
            case '4':
            case '5':
            case '6':
            case '7':
                  numlen = sscanf(here,"%o",&num);
                  *here = (char)num;
                  break;

            case 'x':
                  numlen = sscanf(here,"%x",&num);
                  *here = (char) num;
                  break;
            }
            num = here - string + numlen;
            here++;
            memmove(here,here+numlen,len-num );
      }
      return string;
}