Literal string

A literal string may refer to any of the following:

1. Alternatively called literal(s), a literal string is several characters enclosed in double or single quotes, depending on the programming language or command line. A program does not interpret characters in a literal string until it encounters the next double or single quote.

For example, in Perl using the command below, it would print "Hello World! Here is a $1."

print 'Hello World! Here is a $1';

However, surrounding the string with double quotes instead of single quotes causes Perl to try interpreting the $1 as a variable. Escaping the dollar sign results in Perl treating the dollar sign as a literal character, as shown below.

print "Hello World! Here is a \$1";

The same is true to add a variable to a string. In the following example, the variable $name is assigned "Nathan", and the first print using a single quote is treated as a literal string, which means it prints "Hello $name". However, the second print with double quotes is an interpreted string and would print "Hello Nathan".

use strict;
my $name = "Nathan";
print 'Hello $name';
print "Hello $name";

2. A literal character is a single character that's not interpreted. For example, the * (asterisk) is often treated as a wildcard in searches. To get the literal character would require it to be escaped with another character.

3. When connected to an FTP (File Transfer Protocol) session, the literal command sends a literal string to the connected computer and expects a one-line response.

Concatenation, Machine language, Programming terms, Variable