| Also known as a literal or literals, a literal string is a series of characters that are enclosed in quotes or single quotes depending on the programming language or command line you're using. When a string of characters is treated as literal the programming language or command will not try to interpret anything within the string until it encounters the next quote or single quote. For example, in Perl you'd use the below command to print: Hello World! print "Hello World!"; However, if you wanted to print a quote within the string your program would generate an error because it would not know where the string starts and ends. Therefore you'd need to use an escape character for each quote as shown below. print "I said \"Hello World!\"";
However, if the string was treated as a literal string as shown below you would not need to escape any special programming or command line character except of course the single quote. print 'I said "Hello World!"'; Also see: Machine language, Programming definitions, Variable | 
