3 ms·

What's the difference between a newline character in a string and \n from a regex perspective?

• yogorenapan 3y ago
  It would be \\n
• dwaite 3y ago
  JSON doesn't have native regex support, so you would be representing a regex as a string. /\n/ in regex would need the backslash escaped, so "/\\n/"
• yesco 3y ago
  "\n" is really just two arbitrary characters right? An actual "newline" is just a single invisible character, but we represent it as "\n" for convenience. So in json you are simply putting in the magic character sequence: "\n" in place of the real newline character. Not unlike how many compilers will auto translate "\n" sequences you put in strings into the actual newline character. I believe most json encoders will automatically convert newline characters into the two character sequence, so when you put it all together it goes: character sequence "\n" typed into source file -> compiler converts newline character into actual an actual newline character -> json encoder converts newline character back into "\n" sequence. With all this in mind, since regex is basically doing the same thing as a compiler, treating "\n" sequences as a search for a newline character, you would need to escape the backslash so it is interpreted literally, so "\\n". This gets even weirder depending on the tool/language you are doing this in though, like if you are writing out a regex within a string, the regex engine might not need to have any special logic for "\n" since the compiler is already handling it! In which case: "\\n" is an escape for the compiler not the regex engine. TLDR: You just need to escape it: "\\n"