#25 – String Literals

A string literal in C# represents a sequence of Unicode characters.  There are two main types of string literals in C#–regular string literals and verbatim string literals.  Verbatim string literals allow including special characters in a string directly, rather than having to specify them using an escape sequence.  All string literals are of type string.

Here are some examples of string literals:

 string s1 = "Hi";
 string s2 = @"Hi";       // Verbatim string literal--same thing
 string s3 = "C:\\Dir";   // C:\Dir  (escape seq for backslash)
 string s4 = @"C:\Dir";   // No escape seq required
 string s5 = "\x48\x69";  // Hi  (hex codes for each character)
 string s6 = "\x20AC 1.99";  // € 1.99
 string s7 = "€ 1.99";    // Unicode directly in string

 // UTF-32 characters using surrogate pairs
 string s8 = "\U00020213";      // U+20213 (UTF-32)
 string s9 = "\ud840\ude13";    // Equiv surrogate pair
 string s10 = "𠈓";             // Same character

Note:

• \u is followed by 4-byte UTF16 character code
• \U is followed by 8-byte UTF32 character code, which is then converted to equivalent surrogate pair