Groovy: How to include backslashes inside a string without escaping

groovyscriptingstring

I want to use the following string literal inside my groovy program without having to escape the backslashes:

C:\dev\username

Here is what I have tried so far:

String (Single Quotes) & GStrings (Double Quotes)

def aString = 'C:\dev\username'
def aGString = "C:\dev\username"

Doesn't work because \ has special meaning and is used to escape other characters
I end up having to escape \ with another \

def s = 'C:\\dev\\username'

Slashy String & Dollar Slashy String

Works for some strings, like the following

def slashy = /C:\windows\system32/
def dollarSlashy = $/C:\windows\system32/$

But it interprets \u as having special meaning (the following don't work):

def s1 = /C:\dev\username/
def s2 = $/C:\dev\username/$

Groovy:Did not find four digit hex character code

Best Answer

Wow, another gotcha with putting Windows files paths in slashy strings. Nice catch. The gotcha I've encountered before was including a trailing backslash on the path, e.g. /C:\path\/, which results in an unexpected char: 0xFFFF error.

Anyways, for the sake of an answer, given that Windows paths are case insensitive, why not exploit it for once?

def s = /C:\DEV\USERNAME/

The \u unicode character escape sequence is case sensitive.

Related Solutions

Bash – How to check if a string contains a substring in Bash

You can use Marcus's answer (* wildcards) outside a case statement, too, if you use double brackets:

string='My long string'
if [[ $string == *"My long"* ]]; then
  echo "It's there!"
fi

Note that spaces in the needle string need to be placed between double quotes, and the * wildcards should be outside. Also note that a simple comparison operator is used (i.e. ==), not the regex operator =~.

C++ – How to iterate over the words of a string

I use this to split string by a delimiter. The first puts the results in a pre-constructed vector, the second returns a new vector.

#include <string>
#include <sstream>
#include <vector>
#include <iterator>

template <typename Out>
void split(const std::string &s, char delim, Out result) {
    std::istringstream iss(s);
    std::string item;
    while (std::getline(iss, item, delim)) {
        *result++ = item;
    }
}

std::vector<std::string> split(const std::string &s, char delim) {
    std::vector<std::string> elems;
    split(s, delim, std::back_inserter(elems));
    return elems;
}

Note that this solution does not skip empty tokens, so the following will find 4 items, one of which is empty:

std::vector<std::string> x = split("one:two::three", ':');