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The new home for Visual Studio documentation is Visual Studio 2017 Documentation on docs.microsoft.com.
The latest version of this topic can be found at C String Literals.
A "string literal" is a sequence of characters from the source character set enclosed in double quotation marks (" "). String literals are used to represent a sequence of characters which, taken together, form a null-terminated string. You must always prefix wide-string literals with the letter L.
Syntax
string-literal:
" s-char-sequence opt"
L" s-char-sequence opt"
s-char-sequence:
s-char
s-char-sequence s-char
s-char:
any member of the source character set except the double quotation mark ("), backslash (\), or newline character
escape-sequence
The example below is a simple string literal:
char *amessage = "This is a string literal.";
All escape codes listed in the Escape Sequences table are valid in string literals. To represent a double quotation mark in a string literal, use the escape sequence \". The single quotation mark (') can be represented without an escape sequence. The backslash (\) must be followed with a second backslash (\\) when it appears within a string. When a backslash appears at the end of a line, it is always interpreted as a line-continuation character.