Question

First off, I’m a complete beginner at C++.

I’m coding something using an API, and would like to pass text containing new lines to it, and have it print out the new lines at the other end.

If I hardcode whatever I want it to print out, like so

printInApp("Hello\nWorld");

it does come out as separate lines in the other end, but if I retrieve the text from the app using a method that returns a const char then pass it straight to printInApp (which takes const char as argument), it comes out as a single line.

Why’s this and how would I go about to fix it?

Answer 1

It is the compiler that process escape codes in string literals, not the runtime methods. This is why you can for example have “char c = ‘\n’;” since the compiler just compiles it as “char c = 10”.

If you want to process escape codes in strings such as ‘\’ and ‘n’ as separate characters (eg read as such from a file), you will need to write (or use an existing one) a string function which finds the escape codes and converts them to other values, eg converting a ‘\’ followed by a ‘n’ into a newline (ascii value 10).