The Basics

Sometimes you want to use keywords as variable names. Normally because you're an asshole and hate people, sometimes because you're just weird. However, if you feel an urge to do this, you can, by using the '@' sign before the variable name, like @if or @this. These are valid variable names and you should never use them.

More seriously though, the use of verbatim string literals tells the constructor to use the string literal that follows it "literally". This can be usefull if you are using escape characters or if you want to create a string that spans multiple lines.

Getting into it

There are two good ways to use the verbatim string literal method. There is also one bad, as mentioned above.

The bad way is to create keyword variables:

string @if = "Stupid variable";

string @for = "Horrible...";

The good way was to create strings containing escape characters like \ or to create multi-line strings.

Escape the escape chars

Here are two examples of how to create a string with a windows path:

string myDir = "C:\\Program\\stuff";

string myVerbDir = @"C:\Program\stuff";

Both these variables are correct. However, had we not but a '@'-sign before myVerbDir then we would've recieved this error:

Unrecognized escape sequence (CS1009)

Multiple lines in string

Here are examples on how to create multiline strings:

string myString = @"This string

				spans over many lines

					and that is quite cool,

			isn't it?";

			

			txtMain.Text = myString;

This will look like this:

imagehttp://morkalork.com/images/screenshots/verbatim1.jpg

That is how to create verbatim strings.

There is 1 comment on this article.

oliver

2010-10-20 15:29:52

loving your site mate your tuts are so easy to read wkd stuff just started geting into c# with mysql coming from php side nice juts what im after...thanks

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