Lua Quick Start Guide

Escape characters

Strings need to be within quotes, but what happens when you need to put quotes inside the string? Lua doesn't care if a string uses single or double quotes, so long as the symbol at the start and end of the string matches, so technically this code would be valid:

message = 'he said "bye" and left'print (message)

However, this is not desirable. As a convention, only double quotes will be used to represent a string throughout this book. To include a double quote within a string, the character must be escaped. Escaping a character means the character will be treated as part of the string, rather than a Lua instruction. To escape a character, place a \ in front of it, like so:

message = "he said \"bye\" and left"print (message) ...