Question

I have a String that stores a path. When I print the path, it is like: D:\UnderTest\wavtester.wav. In this string I wanted to know the index of the last occurrence of \ character (the goal is to get the name of the file represented in the String), so I tried to use the method:

int x = nameOfAudioFile.lastIndexOf('\');

But I get an error corresponding to this statement saying : unclosed character literal

• What does this error mean?
• How can I solve this error?

Answer 1

The \ character has special functions in character and string constant, so you need to escape it in order to write it itself as a character literal: string.lastIndexOf('\\').

Acatually, in order to be portable you probably want to use File.separatorChar instead of an explicit character constant. That way you’ll get / on unix instead of \.