Unicode string in Java (Android) not working

Question

I'm making next record in order to compare entered chars with this array:

 String[] GSM_7_BIT_EXT = {"\u000c", "\u005e", "\u007b", "\u007d", "\u005c", "\u005b", "\u007e", "\u005d", "\u007c", "\u20ac"};

After compile (Android Studio) getting lot of mistakes, like:
- '}' expected
- illegal character: \35
- expected
and many others.

What am I doing wrong?

wero · Accepted Answer · 2015-12-26 16:21:39Z

5

The culprit is \u005c: This is the backslash character, therefore "\u005c" is equal to "\" which is not a valid string literal. (Test this by removing "\u005c" from the array definition).

You could write "\\" instead.

answered Dec 26, 2015 at 16:21

wero

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5 Comments

Goltsev Eugene Over a year ago

Thanks a lot! This works. Please can you share list of such invalid string literals? Cannot find it in google.

wero Over a year ago

@GoltsevEugene: the backslashs starts a escape sequence, see stackoverflow.com/a/1367339/3215527, therefore to write a string literal with a backslash character you need to write it as \\.

VGR Over a year ago

What's actually happening is that, unlike all other escape sequences, \u is not specific to Strings or chars. It can appear outside of String and char literals, and is parsed before anything else. You could, for example, write \u0053\u0074\u0072\u0069\u006e\u0067[] instead of String[] and it would compile just fine. That's why "\u005c" is equivalent to writing "\" in code, which is not legal syntax.

Goltsev Eugene Over a year ago

Thanks, I understood that. But what other symbols are illegal inside String?

wero Over a year ago

@GoltsevEugene \ and " cannnot simply be placed in a string but need to be escaped.

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