Unrecognized escape sequences in string literals

Douglas Alan darkwater42 at gmail.com
Tue Aug 11 16:20:52 EDT 2009


On Aug 11, 2:00 pm, Steven D'Aprano <st... at REMOVE-THIS-
cybersource.com.au> wrote:

> > test.cpp:1:1: warning: unknown escape sequence '\y'
>
> Isn't that a warning, not a fatal error? So what does temp contain?

My "Annotated C++ Reference Manual" is packed, and surprisingly in
Stroustrup's Third Edition, there is no mention of the issue in the
entire 1,000 pages. But Microsoft to the rescue:

     If you want a backslash character to appear within a string,
     you must type two backslashes (\\)

(From http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/69ze775t.aspx)

The question of what any specific C++ does if you ignore the warning
is irrelevant, as such behavior in C++ is almost *always* undefined.
Hence the warning.

|>ouglas



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