Metacharacters
Many languages support the use of metacharacters inside string literals. Metacharacters have varying interpretations depending on the context and language, but are generally a kind of 'processing command' for representing printing or nonprinting characters.
For instance, in a C string literal, if the backslash is followed by a letter such as "b", "n" or "t", then this represents a nonprinting backspace, newline or tab character respectively. Or if the backslash is followed by 1-3 octal digits, then this sequence is interpreted as representing the arbitrary character with the specified ASCII code. This was later extended to allow more modern hexadecimal character code notation:
"I said,\t\t\x22Can you hear me?\x22\n"Read more about this topic: String Literal