Step 4 of 5

Escape sequences

Inside a string, some characters are special. A " would end the string early, and there's no key for "new line" that you can put between quotes. C solves this with escape sequences: a backslash \ followed by a character, meaning "the next character is not what it looks like".

#include <stdio.h>

int main(void) {
    printf("Name\tScore\n");
    printf("Ada\t95\n");
    printf("A path: C:\\games\\cs\n");
    printf("He said \"nice shot\"\n");
    return 0;
}

Name	Score
Ada	95
A path: C:\games\cs
He said "nice shot"

Each escape sequence is two characters in your source code but becomes one character in the output. The compiler does the translation.

Common mistakes

• Writing "She said "hi"": the second " ends the string, and the compiler gets confused by what follows. Escape the inner quotes.
• Using a forward slash /n instead of a backslash \n. That just prints /n.
• A single \ before a normal letter (like \q) is not a valid escape, and the compiler warns about it.

Your turn: print this line exactly, including the quotes:

She said "gg" and left

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