C++11 New String Literals

In this chapter, you will learn about the newly added string literals like raw string literals and encoded string literals.

After the C++11 standardization, programmer's can able to classify raw string as well as multibyte/wide character string type literals. Here are the two types of String Literals discussed below with code snippets:

Raw String Literals

These types of raw strings allow programmers to define a series of characters by writing precisely its contents like raw character sequence. In this way, you can save a lot of escapes essential for masking special characters. Here's an example of ordinary string literal which represents two backslashes and an n defined as an ordinary string literal as below:

"\\\\n"

and as a raw string literal as follows:

R"(\\n)"

For having a )" inside the raw string, you are free to use a delimiter. So, the complete syntax of a raw string is:

R"delim(...)delim", where delim can be a character except the backslash, whitespaces, and parentheses.

Demonstrating Working of Raw String

Example:

#include <iostream> 
using namespace std;
 
int main()
{
    // Normal string
    string str1 = "Sample.\nmultiline.\ncontent.\n" ; 
 
    // Raw string
    string str2 = R"(Sample.\nmultiline.\ncontent.\n)";

    // Output
    cout << str1 << endl; 
    cout << str2 << endl;
     
    return 0;
}

Output:

Sample.
multiline.
content.

Sample.\nmultiline.\ncontent.\n

Encoded String Literals

By implementing an encoding prefix, you can classify a special character indoctrination for string literals. The below-mentioned encoding prefixes are defined:

• u8 is used to define a UTF-8 encoding scheme. A UTF-8 string literal usually initialized with the given characters as encoded fixed in UTF-8. The characters contain type const char.
• u is used to defining a string literal having characters of category char16_t.
• U is used to defining a string literal having characters of the form char32_t.
• L is used to define a broad string literal having characters of the form wchar_t.

Example:

const char[] str = L"helloWorld" // defines "helloWorld" as wchar_t string literal

The initial R of a raw string can be preceded by an encoding prefix.