Based on input received since the reveal of
https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/browse/JDK-8196004
Raw String Literals, we propose making the following changes.
- We will be extending the definition of raw string literals to allow
repeating backticks (ala Markdown.)
The benefit of this is that, for a suitably chosen delimiter, any
document can be embedded with no loss of fidelity. For embedded
documents that use ` in them, choose a suitable delimiter (usually ``
will be enough) and paste away. We stated earlier that it was a goal to
make raw string literals truly free of interpretation by the lexer; this
removes one of the remaining bits of non-raw-ness, that embedded
backticks required some minor escaping. (The other remaining bit is
the treatment of newlines; not sure how much its worth doing here to
support platform-specific line endings.) If people really want
platform-specific newlines, they can toss a .replace("\n", "\r\n") on
the end (which is amenable to the same optimizations as .trimIndent()).
- The naming of the the “escape" and “unescape" String methods will be
reversed such that “unescape" converts escape sequences to characters
and “escape" converts worthy characters to escape sequences. Some more
thought could be given to these names 1) to address the overloaded use
in other languages, ex. JavaScript HTML escaping, 2) truly make the
direction of conversion clear.
I think this is a better polarity, but I think this exercise shows that
"escape" and "unescape" may still be too-confusing names. I suggest we
continue the search for names that shout out their directionality.
Ultimately, ignoring escapes, we would end up with two ways of do the
same thing. Thus, we will not be supporting multi-line traditional
strings at this time.
I think this is the right move, though there are arguments on both sides
here. The new feature is raw string literals, which are designed for
embedding longer (but not too long) snippets of text free of Java
interpretation. For the rare cases where people want both string
escaping and multi-line, there are library tools for adding back the
escaping.
