Stephens' C# Programming with Visual Studio® 2010 24-Hour Trainer

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LESSON 11 Using Variables and Performing CalCUlations

You can use double quotes to surround strings and single quotes to surround chars as in the

following code:

string firstName = “William”;

string lastName = “Gates”;

char middleInitial = ‘H’;

Sometimes you might like to include a special character such as a carriage return or tab character in

a string literal. Unfortunately, you can’t simply type a carriage return into a string because it would

start a new line of code.

To work around this dilemma, C# provides escape sequences that represent special characters. An

escape sequence is a sequence of characters that represent a special character such as a carriage

return or tab.

Table 11-3 lists C#’s escape sequences.

TABLE 113

SEQUENCE MEANING

\a

Bell

\b

Backspace

\f

Formfeed

\n

Newline

\r

Carriage return

\t

Horizontal tab

\v

Vertical tab

\‘

Single quotation mark

\“

Double quotation mark

\\

Backslash

\?

Question mark

\OOO

ASCII character in octal

\xhh

ASCII character in hexadecimal

\xhhhh

Unicode character in hexadecimal

For example, the following code makes a variable that refers to a string that contains quotes and a

newline character:

string txt = “Unknown value \“ten.\“\nPlease enter a number.”;

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Type Conversions

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When you display this string in a MessageBox, the u ...