literal characters

Special characters cannot be directly included in a literal string

Special characters, such as [[control_character?]]s or [[metacharacter?]]s cannot be included directly in a string value. This is because these [[character?]]s have a special meaning to the awk interpreter, and may cause [[misbehaviour?]] of the [[script?]]. These [[character?]]s can be inserted as literal characters by using literal character notation.

Literal Character Notation

Literal character notation enables [[special_character?]]s to represented in a string by using a [[representation_code?]] that begins with a backslash symbol:

Literal Character Representation Digraphs

The following table shows literal characters that can be represented using the backslash, together with the digraphical representation codes:

Numerical Literal Character Representation

Literal ascii character codes can also be output using a numeric representation code:

Using a backslash to insert literal characters into a string

The following example shows how a backslash symbol is used to insert literal characters into a string. Note that the \n digraph is used to represent a newline character:

{{{

print "first line\nsecond line" # The \n represents a newline character in a string

}}}

The above literal string contains an embedded newline character and should print as follows:

 first line
 second line