Escaping

When writing strings, the backslash character \ is used to “escape” special characters. That is, backslash is a signal to interpret the next character differently. We’ve seen this with quotes already. Another good example is \n, which represents a newline. There are plenty of others, like \t to mean a “tab” (nominally, 4 or 8 spaces, but displayed in an “aligned” way).

We also used the backslash character to work with quotes:

And if you want to write a literal backslash, you just write two of them, to “escape” the second backslash and turn off its special meaning: