Escapes and multiline strings

• Raw string literals
  • Backtick escape
• Interpreted string literals
  • Double quote escape
• Escape HTML
• Escape URL
• All escape characters

Raw string literals

Raw string literals, delimited by backticks (back quotes), are interpreted literally. They can contain line breaks, and backslashes have no special meaning.

const s = `First line
Second line`
fmt.Println(s)

First line
Second line

Backtick escape

It’s not possible to include a backtick in a raw string literal, but you can do

fmt.Println("`" + "foo" + "`") // Prints: `foo`

Interpreted string literals

To insert escape characters, use interpreted string literals delimited by double quotes.

const s = "\tFirst line\n" +
"Second line"
fmt.Println(s)

	First line
Second line

The escape character \t denotes a horizontal tab and \n is a line feed or newline.

Double quote escape

Use \" to insert a double quote in an interpreted string literal:

fmt.Println("\"foo\"") // Prints: "foo"

Escape HTML

Use html.EscpapeString to encode a string so that it can be safely placed inside HTML text. The function escapes the five characters <, >, &, ' and ".

const s = `"Foo's Bar" <foobar@example.com>`
fmt.Println(html.EscapeString(s))

"Foo's Bar" <foobar@example.com>

html.UnescapeString does the inverse transformation.

Escape URL

Use url.PathEscape in package net/url to encode a string so it can be safely placed inside a URL. The function uses percent-encoding.

const s = `Foo's Bar?`
fmt.Println(url.PathEscape(s))

Foo%27s%20Bar%3F

url.PathUnescape does the inverse transformation.

All escape characters

Arbitrary character values can be encoded with backslash escapes and used in string or rune literals. There are four different formats:

• \x followed by exactly two hexadecimal digits,
• \ followed by exactly three octal digits,
• \u followed by exactly four hexadecimal digits,
• \U followed by exactly eight hexadecimal digits,

where the escapes \u and \U represent Unicode code points.

The following special escape values are also available.

fmt.Println("\\caf\u00e9") // Prints string: \café
fmt.Printf("%c", '\u00e9') // Prints character: é

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