3.3.1. Escape Sequences

We have already encountered the \n "escape sequence" which can come inside strings and designates a newline character. There are many others in perl. Here is a list of the most important ones:

• \\ - designates an actual backslash (\)
• \" - designates an actual double-quote character (")
• \$ - an actual dollar sign (a real $ does something else)
• \@ - an actual at-sign (a non-escaped @ does something else)
• \n - a newline character
• \r - a carriage return sign
• \t - a tab character
• \xDD - where "DD" are two hexadecimal digits - gives the character whose ASCII code is "DD".

Here's an example to illustrate some of them:

print "I said \"hi!\" to myself, and received no reply.\n";

print "This program will cost you \$100 dollars.\n";

print "The KDE\\GNOME holy war makes life in the Linux world " .
      "more interesting.\n";

whose output is:

I said "hi!" to myself, and received no reply.
This program will cost you $100 dollars.
The KDE\GNOME holy war makes life in the Linux world more interesting.