Triple quotes in Java like Scala

Question

In Scala you can do something like this:

val expr = """ This is a "string" with "quotes" in it! """

Is there something like this in Java? I abhor using "\"" to represent strings with quotes in them. Especially when composing key/value pairs in JSON. Disgusting!

Answer 1

There is no good alternative to using \" to include double-quotes in your string literal.

There are bad alternatives:

• Use \u0022, the Unicode escape for a double-quote character. The compiler treats a Unicode escape as if that character was typed. It's treated as a double-quote character in the source code, ending/beginning a String literal, so this does NOT work.
• Concatenate the character '"', e.g. "This is a " + '"' + "string". This will work, but it seems to be even uglier and less readable than just using \".
• Concatenate the char 34 to represent the double-quote character, e.g. "This is a " + (char) 34 + "string". This will work, but it's even less obvious that you're attempting to place a double-quote character in your string.
• Copy and paste Word's "smart quotes", e.g. "This is a “string” with “quotes” in it!". These aren't the same characters (Unicode U+201C and U+201D); they have different appearances, but they'll work.

I suppose to hide the "disgusting"-ness, you could hide it behind a constant.

public static final String DOUBLE_QUOTE = "\"";

Then you could use:

String expr = " This is a " + DOUBLE_QUOTE + "string" + DOUBLE_QUOTE + ...;

It's more readable than other options, but it's still not very readable, and it's still ugly.

There is no """ mechanism in Java, so using the escape \", is the best option. It's the most readable, and it's the least ugly.