Literal Line feed

[Pal Sudarshan]

Hi,

When I compile the code below, I get an error message stating, "illegal line end in character literal" What is reason for that? When and how can we use this literal then?

class CheckLineFeed
{
  public static void main(String[] args)
  {
     char c = '\u000A';
     System.out.print(c);
  }
}

[Chris Allen]

Originally posted by Pal Sudarshan:
Hi,

When I compile the code below, I get an error message stating, "illegal line end in character literal" What is reason for that? When and how can we use this literal then?

class CheckLineFeed
{
  public static void main(String[] args)
  {
     char c = '\u000A';
     System.out.print(c);
  }
}

During the compilation process, the unicode character \u000A gets converted to the end of line character which causes the compiler error. You can use '\n' for newline instead.

[Pal Sudarshan]

First, thank you for the reply.

Why does it cause compiler error? "It gets converted to end of line." If it gets end of line, what is the problem with that? Why doesn't it do the same function as '\n'? If it is in the language, then where can we use the literal?

Again, thanks for the reply.

[Robert Miller]

The problem with that code is the compiler converts unicode characters before it parses the code. Therefore, the java compiler will end up seeing a line that looks like:

char c = '
';

which is illegal. I don't know the exact sequence the compiler goes through, but I suppose you could use unicode sequences to build up keywords and that would also work.

In any case, the compiler does not convert '\n' before parsing the code, so use that instead of '\u000A'.

Robert