Multi-line string literals behave sane only in REPL and Worksheet

Question

REPL:

scala> val a = "hello\nworld"
a: String = 
hello
world

scala> val b = """hello
     | world"""
b: String = 
hello
world

scala> a == b
res0: Boolean = true

Worksheet:

val a = "hello\nworld"                        //> a  : String = hello
                                              //| world

val b = """hello
world"""                                      //> b  : String = hello
                                              //| world

a == b                                        //> res0: Boolean = true

Normal Scala code:

val a = "hello\nworld"

val b = """hello
world"""

println(a)
println(b)
println(a == b)

Output:

hello
world
hello
world
false

Why does the comparison yield true in the REPL and in the Worksheet, but false in normal Scala code?

---

Interesting, b appears to be one char longer than a, so I printed the Unicode values:

println(a.map(_.toInt))
println(b.map(_.toInt))

Output:

Vector(104, 101, 108, 108, 111, 10, 119, 111, 114, 108, 100)
Vector(104, 101, 108, 108, 111, 13, 10, 119, 111, 114, 108, 100)

Does that mean multi-line string literals have platform-dependent values? I use Eclipse on Windows.

Answer 1

I guess it's because of the source file encoding.

Try to check a.toList.length and b.toList.length. It seems b == "hello\r\nworld".

Multi-line string literal value depends not on the platform, but on the encoding of the source file. Actually you'll get exactly what you have in the source file between """. If there is \r\n you'll get it in your String.