Does javascript have literal strings?

Question

In c# and ruby and many other languages you can denote a string as to not need escaping.
in c# its like this

string s = @"\whatever\this\is";

the results are when printed

\whatever\this\is

my question is, is this supported in any form in javascript?

Answer 1

Short answer: No

Long answer: Noooooooooooooooooooooooooo

Answer 2

I don't know what you're getting at, but one way to get around the problem of escaping (etc) is use a trick that John Resig seems to like a lot. You include <script> blocks in a page, but give them a "type" like "text/plain" to make sure that the browser doesn't hand them over to Javascript. Then use the text of the script block for whatever you like.

<script id='a_string' type='text/plain'>
  Here is some stuff.
  There might be some \escape sequences in it.
</script>

Then you can grab that with $('#a_string').text() (or with getElementById if you're not using jQuery or something like that).

edit: Here's John Resig's explanation about why dropping stuff into script blocks like that is a good idea:

Quick tip: Embedding scripts in your page that have a unknown content-type (such is the case here - the browser doesn't know how to execute a text/html script) are simply ignored by the browser - and by search engines and screenreaders. It's a perfect cloaking device for sneaking templates into your page. I like to use this technique for quick-and-dirty cases where I just need a little template or two on the page and want something light and fast.

Taken from this page: http://ejohn.org/blog/javascript-micro-templating/

Answer 3

Literal strings are available through the use of ES6 language features. Node v4.x now supports these and around 90% of the other ES6 additions as well.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/template_strings

In JS string literals are known as Template Strings. And the syntax is pretty straight forward.

Answer 4

Just escape the escapes

var myCrazyString = "\\yes\\we\\have\\no\\bananas"

Answer 5

I know it is six years late now, but I've got one solution to this ;)

function literalString(regex) {
    return ('' + regex).slice(1, -1);
};

O.innerHTML = literalString(/\whatever\this\is/);

<pre id=O>

You basically convert a regex to string and removes the first and last characters.

Answer 6

This will work as long as you don't throw a \x into the string!

var str = String.raw`\whatever\this\is`;

console.log(str);