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Possible Duplicate:
what does “@” means in c#

What does the sign @ mean in the following:

Class.Field = @"your text here";

I came across this in a piece of code, the compiler does not seem to complain... I've searched around to no avail...

What does the @ mean?

Community
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unom
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  • You will find more info here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/362314fe.aspx – codaddict Oct 07 '10 at 18:20
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    For your future reference the name of this feature is "verbatim string literals". That should help you do web searches for it, and so on. – Eric Lippert Oct 07 '10 at 18:20

4 Answers4

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It indicates a verbatim string literal. You can use it so escapes aren't treated as such:

string path = "C:\\Documents and Settings\\UserName\\My Documents";

Becomes:

string path = @"C:\Documents and Settings\UserName\My Documents";
Justin Niessner
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You can do something like

@"C:\temp\testfile.txt"

Without @ you would need to do 

"C:\\temp\\testfile.txt"

Also it helps you work with other more complicated strings that should represent XML, for example.

Only one thing that you would need to double-write is " itself.

So, @"Tom said ""Hello!""";

Andriy Buday
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It a short hand so that \ isn't needed to escape the backslash.

In regular expressions, it is very useful because Regex relies so heavily on the backslash character. When using the @ sign, the only character that you need to escape is the double quote, and it is escaped with a second double quote (a al VB). All other characters are literal.

(Directory paths are another form of string that benefits from the @)

In your example, the @ is unnecessary.

Les
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It tells the compiler not to consider the backslash character as an escape sequence.

Robaticus
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