String Literals¶

# Single-quoted strings
name = 'Alice'
greeting = 'Hello, World!'

# Double-quoted strings
message = "Hello, World!"
quote = "She said, 'Hello'"

# Multi-line strings (triple-quoted)
multi = """
This is a
multi-line string
"""

Escape Sequences¶

Escape	Meaning
`\\`	Backslash
`\'`	Single quote
`\"`	Double quote
`\n`	Newline
`\r`	Carriage return
`\t`	Tab
`\b`	Backspace
`\f`	Form feed
`\0`	Null character
`\ooo`	Character with octal value OOO (0–377)
`\xHH`	Character with hex value HH
`\uHHHH`	Unicode 16-bit
`\UHHHHHHHH`	Unicode 32-bit

Implementation - ✅ Single quotes become double quotes; escape sequences map directly to C# string literals.

Raw Strings¶

# Raw strings (backslashes not escaped)
path = r"C:\Users\Alice\Documents"
regex = r"\d+\.\d+"

Implementation - ✅ Native - Maps to C# verbatim strings @"...".

String Type¶

All string literals (regular, raw, multi-line) produce System.String values (Sharpy's str type):

s: str = "hello"           # System.String
r: str = r"C:\path"        # System.String (verbatim)
m: str = """multi"""       # System.String

Historical note: Sharpy previously supported native string literals (n"...") to produce System.String instead of Sharpy.Str. Since str now maps directly to System.String, native string literals are no longer needed and have been removed. See SRP-0007.

No Implicit Concatenation¶

Python joins adjacent string literals at parse time — "hello " "world" is the single string hello world. Sharpy refuses the form (SPY0103, "Expected end of statement, got String"), in every position: statement, expression, and the docstring slot.

s: str = "hello " "world"       # ERROR SPY0103
s: str = "hello " + "world"     # explicit join
name: str = "world"
s: str = f"hello {name}"        # interpolation

This is a deliberate refusal, not an unimplemented feature (#1269). The cost of the convenience is the missing-comma footgun: a dropped comma in a list of strings silently concatenates two elements into one, and the list comes out short with no diagnostic anywhere.

xs = ["a", "b" "c"]     # Python: ['a', 'bc'] — two elements, silently

Axiom precedence: type safety (3) > Python syntax (2). Catalogued in docs/deviations.yaml as no-implicit-string-concat.