Can I escape a double quote in a verbatim string literal?

Question

In a verbatim string literal (@"foo") in C#, backslashes aren't treated as escapes, so doing \" to get a double quote doesn't work. Is there any way to get a double quote in a verbatim string literal?

This understandably doesn't work:

string foo = @"this \"word\" is escaped";

Answer 1

Use a duplicated double quote.

@"this ""word"" is escaped";

outputs:

this "word" is escaped

Answer 2

Use double quotation marks.

string foo = @"this ""word"" is escaped";

Answer 3

For adding some more information, your example will work without the @ symbol (it prevents escaping with \), this way:

string foo = "this \"word\" is escaped!";

It will work both ways but I prefer the double-quote style for it to be easier working, for example, with filenames (with lots of \ in the string).

Answer 4

This should help clear up any questions you may have: C# literals

Here is a table from the linked content:

Regular literal	Verbatim literal	Resulting string
"Hello"	@"Hello"	Hello
"Backslash: \\"	@"Backslash: \"	Backslash: \
"Quote: \""	@"Quote: """	Quote: "
"CRLF:\r\nPost CRLF"	@"CRLF: Post CRLF"	CRLF: Post CRLF

Answer 5

Update: With C# 11 Preview feature - Raw String Literals

string foo1 = """
   this "word" is escaped
   """;

string foo2 = """this "word" is escaped""";

---

History:

There is a proposal open in GitHub for the C# language about having better support for raw string literals. One valid answer, is to encourage the C# team to add a new feature to the language (such as triple quote - like Python).

see https://github.com/dotnet/csharplang/discussions/89#discussioncomment-257343

Answer 6

As the documentation says:

Simple escape sequences ... are interpreted literally. Only a quote escape sequence ("") is not interpreted literally; it produces one double quotation mark. Additionally, in case of a verbatim interpolated string brace escape sequences ({{ and }}) are not interpreted literally; they produce single brace characters.