In Java, is there a way to write a string literal without having to escape quotes?

Say you have a String literal with a lot of quotation marks inside it. You could escape them all, but it's a pain, and difficult to read.

In some languages, you can just do this:

foo = '"Hello, World"';

In Java, however, '' is used for chars, so you can't use it for Strings this way. Some languages have syntax to work around this. For example, in python, you can do this:

"""A pretty "convenient" string"""

Does Java have anything similar?

No, and I've always been annoyed by the lack of different string-literal syntaxes in Java.

Here's a trick I've used from time to time:

String myString = "using `backticks` instead of quotes".replace('`', '"');

I mainly only do something like that for a static field. Since it's static the string-replace code gets called once, upon initialization of the class. So the runtime performance penalty is practically nonexistent, and it makes the code considerably more legible.

The answer is no, and the proof resides in the Java Language Specification:

  StringLiteral:
   "StringCharacters"

  StringCharacters:
   StringCharacter
   | StringCharacters StringCharacter

  StringCharacter:
   InputCharacter but not " or \
   | EscapeSequence

As you can see a StringLiteral can just be bound by " and cannot contain special character without escapes..

A side note: you can embed Groovy inside your project, this will extend the syntax of Java allowing you to use '''multi line string ''', ' "string with single quotes" ' and also "string with ${variable}".

Update Dec. 2018 (12 months later):

Raw string literals (which are on the amber list) won't make it to JDK 12.
See the criticisms here.

There might be in a future version of Java (10 or more).

See JEPS 8196004 from January 2018: ("JEP" is the "JDK Enhancement Program")

JEP draft: Raw String Literals

Add a new kind of literal, a raw string literal, to the Java programming language.
Like the traditional string literal, a raw string literal produces a String, but does not interpret string escapes and can span multiple lines of source code.

So instead of:

Runtime.getRuntime().exec("\"C:\\Program Files\\foo\" bar");
String html = "<html>\n"
              "    <body>\n" +
              "         <p>Hello World.</p>\n" +
              "    </body>\n" +
              "</html>\n";
System.out.println("this".matches("\\w\\w\\w\\w"));

You would be able to type:

Runtime.getRuntime().exec(`"C:\Program Files\foo" bar"`);
    
String html = `<html>
                   <body>
                       <p>Hello World.</p>
                   </body>
               </html>
              `;

System.out.println("this".matches(`\w\w\w\w`));

Neat!

But it is still just a draft: it will need to posted, submitted, be a candidate, and funded, before being completed and making it into the next JDK.

Simple answer: No.

For longer strings that must be escaped, I usually read them from some external resource.

In Java, is there a way to write a string literal without having to escape quotes?

JEP draft: Raw String Literals

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