Re: Escaped newlines with %q format specifier

[Coda Highland <chighland@...>]

On Wed, Jul 2, 2014 at 10:45 AM, Paige DePol <lual@serfnet.org> wrote:
> On Jul 2, 2014, at 12:18 PM, Paige DePol <lual@serfnet.org> wrote:
>
>> I am then left wondering what the escaped literal newline is used for? When quoting strings why wouldn't we want a newline to show up as '\n' instead of a backslash and a literal newline character? As this is existing functionality I will not change it, though I still wonder what it is used for, or if it something that is actually needed?
>
> Guess I should of thought of this issue for longer before posting...
>
> It is used for creating multi-line strings without using the [[ ... ]] syntax:
>
> Lua 5.3.0 (work3)  Copyright (C) 1994-2014 Lua.org, PUC-Rio
>> longstring = "this is a \
>>> long string with \
>>> escaped newlines"
>>
>> print(longstring)
> this is a
> long string with
> escaped newlines
>
> Though, to be honest, my expectation of creating a string in this fashion would of been to have a single string without newlines, just "this is a long string with escaped newlines".
>
> Ah well, sorry for the noise! :)

My expectations match yours in that regard -- this is the behavior of
C and C++ (though not inside strings); a backslashed newline is
removed from the token stream entirely.

/s/ Adam