Javascript - How to show escape characters in a string?
escaping, javascript
Solution
If your goal is to create a string using a string literal like this:
str = "Hello\nWorld";
and output what it contains in string literal form (a fairly specific use case), you can use `JSON.stringify`:
console.log(JSON.stringify(str)); // ""Hello\nWorld""
const str = "Hello\nWorld";
const json = JSON.stringify(str);
console.log(json); // ""Hello\nWorld""
for (let i = 0; i < json.length; ++i) {
console.log(`${i}: ${json.charAt(i)} (0x${json.charCodeAt(i).toString(16).toUpperCase().padStart(4, "0")})`);
}
.as-console-wrapper {
max-height: 100% !important;
}
This is a fairly unusual thing to want to do, though helpful sometimes for debugging in awkward situations where, for whatever reason, you can't use a debugger directly.
`console.log` adds the outer quotes (at least in Chrome's implementation), but the content within them is a string literal (yes, that's somewhat confusing).
`JSON.stringify` takes what you give it (in this case, a string) and returns a string containing valid JSON for that value. So for the above, it returns an opening quote (`"`), the word `Hello`, a backslash (`\`), the letter `n`, the word `World`, and the closing quote (`"`). The linefeed in the string is escaped in the output as a `\` and an `n` because that's how you encode a linefeed in JSON. Other escape sequences are similarly encoded.
To be clear, if you just want to create a string with `H`, `e`, `l`, `l`, `o`, `\`, `n`, `W`, `o`, `r`, `l`, `d` in it, you don't need `JSON.stringify` for that. Just escape the backslash so it's not treated as an escape character: `"Hello\\nWorld"`
console.log("Hello\\nWorld");
The `JSON.stringify` thing is just for situations where you want to see a string-literal-like output for a string with things like newlines in it, usually for debugging.
Problem
Very simple question, but for some reason I can't find the answer anywhere after 10 minutes of Googling. How can I show escape characters when printing in Javascript? Example: ``` str = "Hello\nWorld"; console.log(str); ``` Gives: ``` Hello World ``` When I want it to give: ``` Hello\nWorld ```