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1086 - What does "\"" mean?

by - Joe Ganci

More on Backslashes

I am taking your Authorware scripting course.In the following code, could you please explain the use of the back slashes and quotation marks ("\",\"")?

comment := "\"" ^ FileLocation ^ FileName ^ "\",\"" ^ CurrentPageNum@linkframework ^ "\",\" " ^ IconTitle(CurrentPageID@link framework) ^ "\",\"" ^file date ^ "\",,\"" ^ debugger ^ "\",\"" ^ Date ^ "\",\"" ^ Time ^  "\"," ^debug severity ^ ",\"" ^ debug design ^ "\",,,,\"" ^ EntryText ^ "\""

At the beginning of the book is a section called The Power of the Backslash. Make sure you read that carefully first of all. In the example you're citing, we are creating a string which we are storing in the variable called comment. The string will be a comma-delimited set of data items. Because many of the data items need to be stored with quotation marks around them, the \" becomes a regular quotation mark in the final string. So the final string may look like this:

"C:\Files\Examples\debug.a6p","1"," 1010","25-02-03 01:20:40",,"Joe","4/17/2003 ","10:23 AM",2,"Enhanced",,,,"This is the bug report."

Notice where the commas are. I'm going to separate the fields where the commas are here:

"C:\Files\Examples\debug.a6p","1",
" 1010",
"25-02-03 01:20:40",
,
"Joe",
"4/17/2003",
"10:23 AM",
2,
"Enhanced",
,
,
,
"This is the bug report."
 
What the example does is to concatenate each element together, putting commas in between each element:

comment := "\"" ^ FileLocation ^ FileName ^ "\",\"" ^ CurrentPageNum@link framework ^ "\",\" " ^ IconTitle(CurrentPageID@link framework) ^ "\",\"" ^ file date ^ "\",,\"" ^ debugger ^ "\",\"" ^ Date ^ "\",\"" ^ Time ^  "\"," ^ debug severity ^ ",\"" ^ debug design ^ "\",,,,\"" ^ EntryText ^ "\""

So the first thing you see in the string is a quotation mark stored (which in our data comes immediately before the C:\. You can see that each \" becomes a " in the data items you see above. We use this approach because you cannot use:

"""

The second quote would be considered the end of the string and the third would cause an error. By placing a backslash before the second quotation, we are telling Authorware: "Don't treat the quotation mark following as an end-of-string marker. Instead, take it as a character to store. "

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