Ignore escape sequences in ASCII art

Question

For my command-line-interfaces it's often nice to have a little ASCII art in the beginning, but those often contain many backslashes.

For example:

System.out.println("  _____ _______       _____ _  __ ");
System.out.println(" / ____|__   __|/\   / ____| |/ / ");
System.out.println("| (___    | |  /  \ | |    | ' /  ");
System.out.println(" \___ \   | | / /\ \| |    |  <   ");
System.out.println(" ____) |  | |/ ____ \ |____| . \  ");
System.out.println("|_____/   |_/_/    \_\_____|_|\_\ ");

But since every \ needs to be a \\ this often looks very ugly in code and it's very hard to find/fix an error in the 'font'. Is there a way to tell Java NOT to use escape sequences?

"\\" is the only way to go. If you *really* don't want the double- backquotes, you can always 1) create a static String[] array with each line of text, 2) substitute some "acceptable" marker character for your slash, 3) println() the array in a loop, and 4) String.replace() the marker character with "\\". — paulsm4, Apr 07 '12 at 16:27

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered Apr 07 '12 at 16:27

3

No, Java doesn't have anything like the "verbatim string literals" of C#. If you want to do ASCII art, consider putting it into a text file instead and loading that from the code.

answered Apr 07 '12 at 16:27

Jon Skeet

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score 2 · Answer 2 · answered Apr 07 '12 at 16:28

2

read that "image" from file, that file can be in your jar library :)

answered Apr 07 '12 at 16:28

viliam

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score 2 · Answer 3 · answered Dec 13 '12 at 04:05

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Hate to gravedig this thread, but for anyone else out there looking for this.. Try using unicode!

For example: \u0092 = "\"

answered Dec 13 '12 at 04:05

Joe

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score 1 · Answer 4 · answered Apr 07 '12 at 16:29

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Sorry, dude. No such animal exists.

answered Apr 07 '12 at 16:29

phatfingers

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score 0 · Answer 5 · answered Aug 30 '23 at 14:21

Perhaps a little late but this is for anyone still looking for a solution;

Pattern.quote() can be used to ignore escape sequences.

System.out.println(Pattern.quote("|     |   ____    |       |        ______  "))
System.out.println(Pattern.quote("|     |  |        |       |       /      \ "))
System.out.println(Pattern.quote("|_____|  |__      |       |       |      | "))
System.out.println(Pattern.quote("|     |  |        |       |       |      | "))
System.out.println(Pattern.quote("|     |  |_____   |_____  |_____  \______/ "))
//I apologize for the rushed textblock

More examples

One thing to note escape sequences \Q and \E will be at the start and end of your string

Your code doesn't compile for me (JDK 17 on Windows 11). The backslash (i.e. `\`) still has to be escaped (i.e. `\\`). — Abra, Aug 31 '23 at 05:23

Ignore escape sequences in ASCII art

5 Answers5