Question

Is anyone aware of how to differentiate between the characters '\"' and '"'?
I am trying to pre-process a string and this statement confuses me.

system.assert(' "b" ' == ' "\"" '.replace('\"','b'); //FAILS, returns ' bbb '

Answer 1

In your example, Salesforce is essentially ignoring the backslash as illustrated here:

system.assert('"' == '\"'); // yup
system.assertEquals(1, '\"'.length()); // just one character
system.assertEquals(1, '"'.length()); // just one character--the same one

If your original string has a real backslash character in it, it’s the backslash that you need to escape with another backslash like this:

system.assertEquals(1, '\\'.length()); // just one character:  \
system.assertEquals(2, '\\"'.length()); // two characters:  \"
system.assert(' "b" ' == ' "\\"" '.replace('\\"','b'));