Go as other programming languages has the concept of escaping. A escaping sequence is a combination of characters that has a meaning other than the literal characters contained therein. An escaping sequence commonly uses a escape character which in Go is the \ character. Let's understand more about escaping in Go's context.
Why escape?
Escaping is a commonly used technique that developers use resort to escaping code to:
- encode commands or special data which cannot be directly represented by the alphabet.
- represent characters which cannot be typed in the current context, or would have an undesired interpretation
Escaping in Go
As other programming languages, Go utilizes the backslash (\) character to escape. What to use next? Depends on what you need. Here are some useful values to get you started:
| Escape Sequence | Value |
|---|---|
| \\ | the \ character |
| \' | the ' character |
| \" | the " character |
| \? | the ? character |
| \a | an alert |
| \b | backspace |
| \f | form feed |
| \n | a new line |
| \r | carriage return |
| \t | an horizontal tab |
| \xFF | hexadecimal "FF" |
Examples
So let's check some examples:
Conclusion
On this article we learned about escaping. Escaping in Go is very similar to other programming languages and is extensively used to encode commands or special data which cannot be directly represented by the alphabet or to represent characters which cannot be typed in the current context, or would have an undesired interpretation.
