How does \n work in Char lists in haskell

right now I have a String equal to "...\n...\n...". In my code I want to write this as a list (like ['a','b','c']), but how would this work with the \n? I checked in ghci if string == ['.','.','.','.','.','.','.','.','.'] and it said no, so does anyone know how I would write the \n's in a Char list, thank you.

Solution 1:

A String is a list of Characters, so "foo" and ['f', 'o', 'o'] are exactly the same.

For a new line character '\n' [wiki] you can escape this, so your string "...\n...\n..." is equivalent to:

['.', '.', '.', '\n', '.', '.', '.', '\n', '.', '.', '.']

Here '\n' is a single character, not two: it maps to an ASCII character with codepoint 0a as hexadecimal value (10 as decimal value). The compiler thus sees \n and replaces that with a single character.

You can thus for example filter with filter ('\n' /=) some_string to filter out new line characters from a String.