Is there an equivalent of C#'s verbatim string literals in PHP ?

Question

I know I can create a verbatim string literal in C# by using the @ symbol. For example, the usual

String path = "C:\\MyDocs\\myText.txt";

can also be re-written as

String path = @"C:\MyDocs\myText.txt";

In this way, the string literal isn't cluttered with escape characters and makes it much more readable.

What I would like to know is whether PHP also has an equivalent or do I have to manually escape the string myself?

Answer 1

$path = 'C:\MyDocs\myText.txt';

" double quotes allow for all sorts of special character sequences, ' single quotes are verbatim (there's only some fine print about escaping ' and escaping an escape \).

Answer 2

Even single-quoted strings in PHP have the need for escaping at least literal single-quotes and literal backslashes:

$str = 'Single quotes won\'t help me \ avoid escapes or save a tree';

The only non-parsed solution for PHP is to use nowdocs. This requires you use PHP 5.3.

$str = <<<'EOD'
I mustn't quote verbatim text \
maybe in the version next
EOD;