Escape Characters Cheat Sheet
Escape characters are special sequences used inside strings to represent characters that are otherwise hard or impossible to write directly, such as newlines, tabs, quotes, or control characters.
They are essential in programming languages, regular expressions, JSON, shells, and configuration files.
What Is an Escape Character?
An escape character changes the interpretation of the next character.
Most languages use the backslash (\) as the escape character.
Common Escape Sequences
| Escape | Meaning | Description |
|---|---|---|
\n |
Newline | Line break |
\t |
Tab | Horizontal tab |
\r |
Carriage Return | Move to line start |
\b |
Backspace | Remove previous char |
\f |
Form Feed | Page break |
\\ |
Backslash | Literal \ |
\" |
Double Quote | Inside double-quoted strings |
\' |
Single Quote | Inside single-quoted strings |
\0 |
Null | Null character |
String Examples
Hello\nWorld
Hello\tWorld
Escaping Quotes
printf("She said: \"Hello\"");
'It\'s working'
Python Raw Strings
r"C:\Users\Admin"
Unicode Escapes
"\u0041" // A
char c = '\u0041';
JSON Escaping
{
"path": "C:\\Program Files\\App"
}
Regex Escaping
\.
"\\."
Shell Escaping
echo -e "Hello\nWorld"
Common Pitfalls
- Double escaping
- Unescaped backslashes in paths
- Regex inside strings
- JSON parse errors
Summary
- Escape characters change string interpretation
- Backslash is the primary escape character
- Context matters (string, regex, JSON, shell)