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A string constant consists of a sequence of characters enclosed in either double-quote or single-quote marks. For example, both of the following expressions
"parrot"
'parrot'
represent the string whose contents are `parrot'. Strings in Octave can be of any length.
Since the single-quote mark is also used for the transpose operator (see Arithmetic Ops) but double-quote marks have no other purpose in Octave, it is best to use double-quote marks to denote strings.
In double-quoted strings, the backslash character is used to introduce escape sequences that represent other characters. For example, `\n' embeds a newline character in a double-quoted string and `\"' embeds a double quote character.
In single-quoted strings, backslash is not a special character.
Here is an example showing the difference
toascii ("\n")
=> 10
toascii ('\n')
=> [ 92 110 ]
You may also insert a single quote character in a single-quoted string by using two single quote characters in succession. For example,
'I can''t escape'
=> I can't escape
Here is a table of all the escape sequences used in Octave. They are the same as those used in the C programming language.
\\\"\'\0\a\b\f\n\r\t\vStrings may be concatenated using the notation for defining matrices. For example, the expression
[ "foo" , "bar" , "baz" ]
produces the string whose contents are `foobarbaz'. See Numeric Data Types, for more information about creating matrices.