New escape sequence - \s

Two new escape sequences got introduced with text blocks

• \s
• \<line terminator> 

First lets see how to use "\s"

"\s" is the escape sequence for adding a space character within the string. It can be used in both regular strings and in text blocks. 

Below code shows the usage of "\s" when used within a text block and a regular string. 

public class Main {

    public static void main(String[] args) {

        String poemTextBlock = """
                The\swoods\sare\slovely,\sdark\sand\sdeep\s""";
        String poemString = "The\swoods\sare\slovely,\sdark\sand\sdeep\s";

        System.out.println(poemTextBlock);
        System.out.println(poemString);
    
    }
}

Strings produced by both this text block and the regular string expression are the same. The output is shown below 

We can see that each of the "\s" is replaced by a single space, including one at the end of the line (Remember trailing spaces at the end of the line gets stripped off in text blocks, but not when escape sequence equivalent is used for providing space)

"\s" can be used to include trailing spaces within text block, The escape sequence approach or fencing approach can be used with "\s" to include the needed spaces as explained here. All the techniques given in this post for the usage of octal escape sequence "\040" can be applied with "\s" as well.

We will see the other new escape sequence introduced text blocks - \<line terminator> in the next post

Sample code used in this post can be downloaded from https://github.com/ashokkumarta/awesomely-java/tree/main/2021/03/Language-Features/Text-blocks/New-escape-sequence-1