Java equivalent of C#'s verbatim strings with @

Question

Hi all,

Quick question. Is there an equivalent of @ as applied to strings in Java:

For example I can do @"c:\afolder\afile" in C# and have it ignore the escape characters when processing instead of having to do "c:\\afolder\\aFile". Is there a Java equivalent?

hmmm: stackoverflow is escaping on me .. lol. The second example should read:

c:(double-backslash)afolder(double-backslash)aFile

Answer 1

No. Escaping / externalizing the string is your only choice.

HTH,
Kent

Answer 2

No, Java doesn't have verbatim string literals.

If you want a Java-like (and Java-VM-based) language that does, however, you might want to look at Groovy which has various forms of string literal.

Answer 3

As Kent and Jon have said, no there isn't.

I'm answering just to point out that even if there were, for your particular case, it would be a bad idea in the general case, assuming a more than one-off program.

Java programs run on more platforms than just Windows, and other platforms have different file delimiters. So instead of dealing with escaped backslashes, the correct way to handle your particular example is by getting the file separator property:

    String sep = System.getProperty("file.separator");
    String filename = ROOTDIR + sep + "folder" + sep + "afile";

Where you'd have separately created ROOTDIR based on some policy - not only the platform, but whether you want your "afile" to be relative to the actual file system root, or relative to the user's home directory.

But definitely, using the file separator property makes your programs more widely usable. Is it more work? Yes. As Wanda Sykes says, "But it's worth it".