JDK 12: Raw String Literals

JEP 326 Raw string literals provide a new way to declare strings without escape characters or unicode escapes. Let's take a look at the example below that declares multi-line strings with JDK 12 and prior releases.

To print all the days in a week with new lines, here is how we do it with the current JDK 11 release:

String daysInAWeekStr = "Days in a week \n" +
                                "\t\t\tSunday\n" +
                                 "\t\t\tMonday\n" +
                                "\t\t\tTuesday\n" +
                                "\t\t\tWednesday\n" +
                                 "\t\t\tThursday\n" +
                                 "\t\t\tFriday\n" +
                                 "\t\t\tSaturday\n";
System.out.println(daysInAWeekStr);

This is what it will look like in JDK 12:

String daysInAWeekStr = `Days in a week
                                Sunday
                                 Monday
                                 Tuesday
                                 Wednesday
                                 Thursday
                                 Friday
                                 Saturday`;

System.out.println(daysInAWeekStr);

Notice " ` " characters to define the string variable. It avoids backslashes to escape unicode characters,\n new lines, and avoid "+" appending strings. It also increases the readability by avoiding leaning toothpick syndrome .

Output:

java --enable-preview <class>
Days in a week 
Sunday
Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Saturday

This feature is now (as of writing this blog) available as a preview feature in JDK 12 early access builds . In order to enable this use, pass the  --enable-preview argument.

For more JDK 12 features scheduled in March 2019, click here . This list is not complete and more features might be added. We have to wait until Dec 2018 for the exhaustive list.