There's a pretty good explanation of it here: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Perl_Programming/Strings
Specifically this part: * The sequence \' yields the character ' in the actual string. (This is the exception we already discussed above). * The sequence \\ yields the character \ in the actual string. In other words, two backslashes right next to each other actually yield only one backslash. * A backslash, by itself, cannot be placed at the end of a the single-quoted string. This cannot happen because Perl will think that you are using the \ to escape the closing '. The following examples exemplify the various exceptions, and use them properly: 'I don\'t think so.'; # Note the ' inside is escaped with \ 'Need a \\ (backslash) or \?'; # The \\ gives us \, as does \ 'You can do this: \\'; # A single backslash at the end 'Three \\\'s: "\\\\\"'; # There are three \ chars between "" In the last example, note that the resulting string is Three \'s: "\\\". If you can follow that example, you have definitely mastered how single-quoted strings work! Instead of unreadable backslash escapes, Perl offers other ways<http://perldoc.perl.org/perlop.html#Quote-and-Quote-like-Operators> of quoting strings. The first example above could be written as: q{I don't think so}; # No \ needed to escape the ' From: perl-win32-users-boun...@listserv.activestate.com [mailto:perl-win32-users-boun...@listserv.activestate.com] On Behalf Of Greg Aiken Sent: Wednesday, October 20, 2010 10:10 AM To: perl-win32-users@listserv.activestate.com Subject: lame question "\\\\.\\pipe\\pipename" vs '\\.\pipe\pipename' forgive my ignorance here, but I thought single quoted, or apostrophized [however you call this character] (') text strings were supposed to be interpreted by perl in an unaltered manner. sample code, indicating how to reference a named pipe in the Win32::Pipe module, shows something like this... "\\\\.\\pipe\\pipename<file:///\\pipe\pipename>" (note enclosed in quotes) I thought the excessive quantities of backslashes seemed silly, so I instead used single quotes and tried... '\\.\pipe\pipename' (note enclosed in apostrophies) only to find that my client pipe program did not work. I then did a simple test print program; print '\\.\pipe\pipename'; and I was surprised to see what actually printed to the screen was instead; \.\pipe\pipename (note the first \ is not shown in output!) this explained why my client pipe program was working... but it left me scratching my head to ask, "why is the backslash character being interpreted as a special perl operator when it is found within apostrophies?" I thought that only happened when the backslash is found within quotes, such as (print "\x43"), which should print a capital C thanks in advance to anyone who can explain this to me.
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