help regarding escape character

[Venu Chakravorty]

hi,
i get a compile time error upon compiling:

  class A {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
	args[0] = "\d";
    }
}  

perhaps because "\d" is not an escape character, where as in the next code:

   class A {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
	System.out.println(args[0]);
    }
} 

"/d" gets printed when i invoke - java A "\d".
in the later case doesn't the String "\d" get assigned to "args[0]"? or maybe i am getting no error because i am trying to assign a value at runtime?

regards, venu

[Sebastian Janisch]

The values passed to the program are escaped by the JVM ...

[Ernest Friedman-Hill]

The only thing that's relevant here is that to write an actual '\' character inside a String in Java source code, you must double it:

args[0] = "\\d";

The same goes for character constants:

char c = '\\';

There's no "escaping" of characters read from the command line or from files; a \ is just an ordinary character at runtime. Escaping is just used to turn off the special meaning of the \ character in source code.

[Venu Chakravorty]

thanks