Java 11 and 12 – New Features

Escape sequence hell with traditional string literals

To add a newline or tab to a traditional string value, you can use the escape sequences \n and \t. Escape sequences are letters preceded with \ (a backslash), and they have a special meaning in Java. For example in Java strings, \n is used as a newline, and \t is used as a tab.

An escape sequence is a letter combination used for values that can't be represented directly. For instance, to use the newline control character from ASCII, Java uses \n. Java defines multiple other escape sequences.

The following code shows how you can store the multiline string value with newline and tab escape sequences. The newline and tab escape sequences will include the indentation in the variable HTML: ...