Escape Sequences

There are some important special characters that we don’t type directly, but instead we precede with a \. For instance, to add a new line to a string, we can use \n.

Listing 20 string-newline.cpp

#include <iostream>
#include <string>

int main() {

    std::string force{"May The Force Be With You\n"};

    std::cout << force;

}

When we run this, we see that a new line is output to the terminal.

Tip

\n is slightly different than std::endl—the latter also flushes the output buffer. This can matter for performance, but we don’t worry about this in this class.

Here’s a list of escape sequences.

try it…

Let’s try the “bell”, \a, to see if it has an effect on our terminal.