In Java, is there a way to write a string literal without having to escape quotes?

Asked 13/6, 2010 at 22:45 Answered 18/2, 2022 at 18:50

147

Say you have a String literal with a lot of quotation marks inside it. You could escape them all, but it's a pain, and difficult to read.

In some languages, you can just do this:

foo = '"Hello, World"';

In Java, however, '' is used for chars, so you can't use it for Strings this way. Some languages have syntax to work around this. For example, in python, you can do this:

"""A pretty "convenient" string"""

Does Java have anything similar?

Opalina answered 13/6, 2010 at 22:45 Comment(6)

Related: #2678983 – Dionysian 13/6, 2010 at 22:49

This answer shows how to paste multi-line escaped strings in Eclispe. – Oke 9/3, 2012 at 18:42

Update 2018: raw string literals for Java might be coming. See my answer below – Mccarley 27/1, 2018 at 23:24

import jackson ObjectMapper then System.out.println(mapperObj.writeValueAsString(mapperObj.readValue(str, Object.class))); – Clearly 26/9, 2018 at 4:28

update Q4 2018: raw string literal are not coming just yet. See my updated answer. – Mccarley 15/12, 2018 at 20:24

Coming back to this issue after away from java six years is irritating. – Thrown 6/1, 2020 at 4:51

The answer is no, and the proof resides in the Java Language Specification:

  StringLiteral:
   "StringCharacters"

  StringCharacters:
   StringCharacter
   | StringCharacters StringCharacter

  StringCharacter:
   InputCharacter but not " or \
   | EscapeSequence

As you can see a StringLiteral can just be bound by " and cannot contain special character without escapes..

A side note: you can embed Groovy inside your project, this will extend the syntax of Java allowing you to use '''multi line string ''', ' "string with single quotes" ' and also "string with ${variable}".

Ravenna answered 13/6, 2010 at 22:48 Comment(0)

170

No, and I've always been annoyed by the lack of different string-literal syntaxes in Java.

Here's a trick I've used from time to time:

String myString = "using `backticks` instead of quotes".replace('`', '"');

I mainly only do something like that for a static field. Since it's static the string-replace code gets called once, upon initialization of the class. So the runtime performance penalty is practically nonexistent, and it makes the code considerably more legible.

Nw answered 13/6, 2010 at 22:53 Comment(6)

wouldn't you need to use replaceAll? – Ivers 15/6, 2012 at 3:58

@landon9720 No, .replace replaces all occurrences of a character/character sequence with another character/character sequence. .replaceAll uses regex. – Ganda 16/7, 2012 at 20:54

Out of curiosity do you know if the java compiler would simplify this upon compiling? – Lenten 17/8, 2014 at 0:23

No, I don't think the compiler would simplify this. But it doesn't really matter. It's a very inexpensive call, and if I only do this for static final strings, the cost will only be incurred once, upon classloading. That's a price I'm usually willing to pay for nicer looking code :) – Nw 19/4, 2015 at 23:29

Then what about "\" in myString? – Lomax 21/2, 2017 at 11:51

This is such a simple and yet fancy thing – Clamorous 6/6, 2019 at 9:6

The answer is no, and the proof resides in the Java Language Specification:

  StringLiteral:
   "StringCharacters"

  StringCharacters:
   StringCharacter
   | StringCharacters StringCharacter

  StringCharacter:
   InputCharacter but not " or \
   | EscapeSequence

As you can see a StringLiteral can just be bound by " and cannot contain special character without escapes..

Ravenna answered 13/6, 2010 at 22:48 Comment(0)

Since Java 15¹ there is new feature called Text Blocks. It looks similar to what you mentioned is available in Python:

String text = """
              {
                 "property": "value",
                 "otherProperty": 12
              }
              """;

More details with examples can be found here: https://openjdk.java.net/jeps/378 JEP 378: Text Blocks

¹ Previewed in Java 13 and 14.

Polito answered 25/8, 2020 at 18:14 Comment(1)

Probably not THE correct answer but A possible answer depending on the reader and OP needs. – Metaphor 17/11, 2020 at 2:19

Update Dec. 2018 (12 months later):

Raw string literals (which are on the amber list) won't make it to JDK 12.
See the criticisms here.

There might be in a future version of Java (10 or more).

See JEPS 8196004 from January 2018: ("JEP" is the "JDK Enhancement Program")

JEP draft: Raw String Literals

Add a new kind of literal, a raw string literal, to the Java programming language.
Like the traditional string literal, a raw string literal produces a String, but does not interpret string escapes and can span multiple lines of source code.

So instead of:

Runtime.getRuntime().exec("\"C:\\Program Files\\foo\" bar");
String html = "<html>\n"
              "    <body>\n" +
              "         <p>Hello World.</p>\n" +
              "    </body>\n" +
              "</html>\n";
System.out.println("this".matches("\\w\\w\\w\\w"));

You would be able to type:

Runtime.getRuntime().exec(`"C:\Program Files\foo" bar"`);
    
String html = `<html>
                   <body>
                       <p>Hello World.</p>
                   </body>
               </html>
              `;

System.out.println("this".matches(`\w\w\w\w`));

Neat!

But it is still just a draft: it will need to posted, submitted, be a candidate, and funded, before being completed and making it into the next JDK.

Mccarley answered 27/1, 2018 at 23:23 Comment(0)

Simple answer: No.

For longer strings that must be escaped, I usually read them from some external resource.

Eclair answered 13/6, 2010 at 22:49 Comment(0)

you can also use StringEscapeUtils from apache commons

UPDATE: If someone is interested in some examples here is a useful link : https://dzone.com/articles/commons-lang-3-improved-and-powerful-StringEscapeUtils

Sero answered 3/9, 2012 at 8:57 Comment(4)

Could you please add an example possibly based on the question illustrating how to it for this problem? – Stenograph 14/6, 2013 at 17:13

It is considered suboptimal to only reference another resource that might answer the question. Please consider summarizing the linked page with an example matching the question. – Stenograph 23/6, 2013 at 19:55

I took a look and don't think either really answers the question. The inputs to the static methods are Strings, so no way to have a nicely formatted value in your code. Presumably you could use these methods to read from a file into a String, but I don't think that's the question here. – Randle 8/1, 2017 at 23:41

The linked class (org.apache.commons.lang3.StringEscapeUtils) has been deprecated and replaced with org.apache.commons.text.StringEscapeUtils – Detonate 24/10, 2019 at 14:43

-2

You could use left and/or right quotes if you don't mind the difference, they look pretty similar:

"These “double quotes” don't need nor want to be escaped"

Hildahildagard answered 18/2, 2022 at 18:50 Comment(0)

-5

The following seems to work for me:

String x = "Some Text" + '"' + "More Text" + '"' + "Even More Text";

I think because char is the primitive variable type for String, Strings and chars can be combined (at least the eclipse compiler doesn't seem to complain).

Ahead answered 23/8, 2013 at 12:12 Comment(1)

I think because char is the primitive variable type for String <- Your assumption is incorrect. For that matter, it will also work with a different type, like an int, like so: String x = "Some text" + 33 + "More text"; – Backscratcher 2/9, 2016 at 11:54

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