> On Nov 14, 2020, at 2:06 PM, ToddAndMargo via perl6-users
> <perl6-us...@perl.org> wrote:
—snip—
> But my question still holds.
> Why is the \n inside the cell printed literally?
The two characters, backslash and `n`, are output literally,
because you have *input* them literally.
In single quotes, the backslash does not combine with the `n` at all. They both
remain separate characters.
Single angle brackets follow single quoting rules, and only then split on
whitespace.
When you said:
my @x = <"aaa\n","bbb\n","ccc\n">;
, you populated @x with only one element.
That element is a single 23-character string, with no whitespace in it.
Example code, for exploration:
my @z =
"\n" , # 1 char : newline
'\n' , # 2 chars: backslash, 'n'
<\n> , # 2 chars: backslash, 'n'
<<\n>> , # Empty list: because newline is whitespace, so it vanishes
"a \n b" , # 5 chars: 'a', newline, 'b'
'a \n b' , # 6 chars: 'a', backslash, 'n', 'b'
<a \n b> , # List of 3 elements, of lengths 1,2,1: 'a', '\n', ‘b’
The only whitespaces are the two separate space characters (one on the left of
the backslash character, and one to the right of the ’n’ character), hence the
word-quoting creates 3 elements.
<<a \n b>> , # List of 2 elements, each is 1 char: 'a', 'b’; The
“space newline space” is all a big chunk of whitespace, and the word-quoting
effect just uses it to separate ‘a’ and ‘b'
;
say $_ ~~ Str ?? .chars !! .list».chars for @z;
say '';
dd $_ for @z;
Output:
1
2
2
()
5
6
(1 2 1)
(1 1)
Str @z = "\n"
Str @z = "\\n"
Str @z = "\\n"
List @z = $( )
Str @z = "a \n b"
Str @z = "a \\n b"
List @z = $("a", "\\n", "b")
List @z = $("a", "b")
—
Hope this helps,
Bruce Gray (Util of PerlMonks)
