Except it’s fun: Escape Characters in 3 minutes
Ahh the escape character — my favourite! All you have to do is remember:
The escape character giveth, and the escape character taketh away…
What is it?
A character like any other on your keyboard, but with a special and important mission… Most often — it’s represented by the \ character.
What does it do?
It alters the behaviour of the character immediately after it!
Alters.. how?
OK — story time:
The escape character ( \ ) precedes any other character. If the character it precedes is a metacharacter (or, as I like to say, “has superpowers”!) — it turns it back into a normal character.
Many languages designated metacharacters to perform special commands. For example, * in Word will create bullet points, whilst + in regular expressions is a “1 or more” quantifier. Well, no more! Pair them with the \ and you strip them off their powers — easy peasy! (Examples at the end)
Right! And if it doesn’t have superpowers?
Not so fast! Some of the “normal” characters are really superheroes in disguise! In that case:
The escape character may “activate” the superpowers of a seemingly standard character as well (or as I like to say, remove its disguise!). Not all “normal” characters are latent heroes though, some are just themselves. (and that’s more than enough ❤)
For example, the letter ‘d’ is a seemingly standard, hard-working citizen amongst the characters. Pair it with \ → \d and behold! Many programming languages recognizing regular expressions will quickly tell you that’s a shortcut for “digits” or all characters from 0 to 9.
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And that’s all! In short, the escape character:
If it can* : It will swap the metacharacter back to a normal one and vice-versa.
\* Here being that some normal characters have no meta version. :)
Examples
- Let’s type some reactions on Discord:
Here’s the results!
2. What about “normal” to “special”? Let’s check Python!
This was escape characters in 3 minutes! What should we learn next? Thank you for reading. :)
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I’m open to answering any other questions in private — just drop me a message on LinkedIn or Email :)
Find me on: Github || LinkedIn or via email at axl_acc@yahoo.ro
