I'm making a dialogue system in gdscript and am struggling with escape characters, specifically '\n'.
I'm using CastleDB as, although not perfect, it has allowed me to have almost everything stored in data and will allow the person doing the writing for the game to do everything outside the engine, without me having to copy and paste stuff in.
I've hit a stumbling block with escape characters. A single text entry in CastleDB doesn't support spaces, and '\n' within the string prints to '\n', not a space, in the dialog box.
I've tried using the format string function with 'some text here {space} some more text', with the space referencing a string consisting of just \n. This still prints \n. If I feed some constant string with \n in the middle directly into the function which displays the dialog text, it adds a space so I'm not really sure what is going on here.
I don't have a computer science background (I've done some C up until pointers, at which point I decided to return later).
Is there something going on in the background with my string in gdscript? It prints out just like you would expect a string to, apart from ignoring my escape characters.
Could it be something to do with the fact that it comes in as a JSON? As far as I'm aware, even if a string is chopped up and reassembled, it should still just behave like a string...?!
Anyway, I haven't included any code because I don't know what code you'd need to see. I'm hoping it's something simple that because I'm teaching myself as I go I just wasn't aware of, but can post code if it helps.
Thanks,
James
Escape sequences are a way of getting around issues with syntax. When you type a string in most programming languages, it starts with " and ends with another ". And it needs to stay on one line. Simple, right?
What if you want to put an actual " in your string? Or a new line? We need some way of telling the compiler, "hey, we want to insert a newline here, even though we can't use an actual newline character". So we use a \ to let the compiler know that the next character is part of an escape sequence.
This causes another problem: What if we literally want to put a backslash in a string? That's where the double backslash comes from: \\ is the escape sequence for \, since \ by itself has a special meaning.
But CastleDB (apparently, I'm not familiar with it) doesn't recognize escape sequences, so when you type \n it thinks you literally want \ followed by n. When it converts this to JSON, it inserts the \\ because JSON does recognize escape sequences.
GDScript also recognizes escape sequences, so print("Hello\nworld!") prints
Hello
world!
You could try input_string.replace("\\n", "\n") to replace the \n escape sequences.