Escape character

Escape character

Introduction to Python

Published in Vasudevan Lakshminarayanan, Hassen Ghalila, Ahmed Ammar, L. Srinivasa Varadharajan, Understanding Optics with Python, 2018

Vasudevan Lakshminarayanan, Hassen Ghalila, Ahmed Ammar, L. Srinivasa Varadharajan

The combination of the backslash and the single quote is called an escape sequence. The name comes from the fact that we’re “escaping” from Python’s usual syntax rules for a moment. When Python sees a backslash inside a string, it means that the next character represents something special—in this case, a single quote, rather than the end of the string. The backslash is called an escape character, since it signals the start of an escape sequence.

History of personal computers in Japan

View Article

Journal Information

Published in International Journal of Parallel, Emergent and Distributed Systems, 2020

Ryozo Yamashita

Of these inevitable characters, 5C (backslash) is used as a special meta-character in the following cases. When this character appears as the second byte of the Shift JIS code, it causes the following problems in the processing systems which do not process 2-byte character codes. Since it is used as a file path delimiter in MS-DOS/Windows, Japanese path names may not be interpreted correctly.Since it is defined as an escape character in HTML and many other language processing systems, characters that contain 5C in the second byte are handled incorrectly because they are treated as escape meta-character instead of a 2-byte character.

Explore chapters and articles related to this topic

Introduction to Python

History of personal computers in Japan