What's the @ in front of a string in C#?

c# .net string
Klaw picture Klaw · Feb 17, 2009 · Viewed 269.6k times · Source

This is a .NET question for C# (or possibly VB.net), but I am trying to figure out what's the difference between the following declarations:

string hello = "hello";

vs. 

string hello_alias = @"hello";

Printing out on the console makes no difference, the length properties are the same.

Answer

Richard Ev picture Richard Ev · Feb 17, 2009

It marks the string as a verbatim string literal - anything in the string that would normally be interpreted as an escape sequence is ignored.

So "C:\\Users\\Rich" is the same as @"C:\Users\Rich"

There is one exception: an escape sequence is needed for the double quote. To escape a double quote, you need to put two double quotes in a row. For instance, @"""" evaluates to ".

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