Escape Sequences in C

This C Tutorial explains Escape Sequences/Character Escapes and why they are needed.

What is an Escape Sequences in C?
One or more characters following ‘\’ (the backslash) is considered to be a single character and is called the escape sequence.

List of Escape Sequences in C:

• \? used to write multiple question marks from being interpreted as trigraphs in printf() statements.
• \” used to get the quotation marks inside the string literals.
• \’ used to write a character literal for a character.
• \\ used to write a backslash from being interpreted as a character escape.
• \a used for alert or beep.
• \b used for backspace
• \0 used for Null value.
• \n is used to insert new line.
• \t is used for tabspace.
• \nnn is commonly used to represent an octal number.
• \xhh is used to represent an hexadecimal number.

Escape sequences are used in a program to override the special meaning of characters in particular contexts!

For example:

Example 1:

printf("What is your name? Are you \"some Xyz\"?");    
/*
 * OUTPUT: What is your name? Are you "some XYZ"?
 * Note the Name in output enclosed in Quotation Marks
 */

Example 2:

#include<stdio.h>
int main()
{
    printf("Learn more about \t escape sequences\n");
    printf("@ Sanfoundry");
    return (0);
}

Output:

Learn more about 	 escape sequences
@ Sanfoundry

Trigraphs

Trigraphs are all three-lettered characters, all begin with ?? (double question marks) followed by a character, represent some other character. Basically, they are used to complement a Character Set lacking for some characters. For example:

??( represent [
??) represent ]