Strings

Characters

A character is a single Unicode element enclosed within quotes U+0022 (") with the exception of U+0022 itself, which must be escaped by a preceding U+005C character (\).

var aCharacter: chr = "z\n"
var anotherOne: str = "語\n"

Raw characters

Raw character literals do not process any escapes. They are enclosed within single-quotes U+0027 (') with the exception of U+0027 itself:

var aCharacter: chr = 'z'

Strings

A string is a single or a sequence of Unicode elements enclosed within quotes U+0022 (") with the exception of U+0022 itself, which must be escaped by a preceding U+005C character (\).

var hiInEnglish: str = "Hello, world!\n"
var hInCantonese: str = "日本語"

Line-breaks are allowed in strings. A line-break is either a newline (U+000A) or a pair of carriage return and newline (U+000D, U+000A). Both byte sequences are normally translated to U+000A, but as a special exception, when an unescaped U+005C character (\ occurs immediately before the line-break, the U+005C character, the line-break, and all whitespace at the beginning of the next line are ignored. Thus a and b are equal:

var a: str = "foobar";
var b: str = "foo\
              bar";

assert(a,b);

Escape sequences

Some additional escapes are available in either character or non-raw string literals.

Raw strings

Just like raw characters, raw string literals do not process any escapes either. They are enclosed within single-quotes U+0027 (') with the exception of U+0027 itself:

var hiInEnglish: str = 'Hello, world!'

Booleans

The two values of the boolean type are written true and false:

var isPresent: bol = false;