Escaping special characters

Problem

You want to print special characters, like a newline.

Using a regular string quotes like 'foo\nfoo' will not convert the \n to a newline character; you'll just get a \ and an n.

Solution

To print special characters such as those listed in the table below, use the sprintf() function.


tab	`\t`
newline	`\n`
backslash	`\\`
percent	`%%`

sprintf('before tab\tafter tab')
% before tab    after tab

sprintf('first line\nsecond line')
% first line
% second line

sprintf('backslash: \\')
% backslash: \

sprintf('percent: %%')
% percent: %