Character literals

What if you want to break down some words and spaces into separate characters? If you do so, you're creating Character literals. We represent Character literals in single quotes. Any Unicode character or escape sequence can be represented as a Character literal. What's an escape sequence, by the way? Let's take this backslash for example. If we try this:

scala> val aChar = '\'
<console>:1: error: unclosed character literal
val aChar = '\'

This will not work at all, because this '\' is an escape character. By definition, an escape sequence or character is something that does not represent itself in String or Character literal. To define these characters, we use this sequence:

scala> val doublequotes = "\""
doublequotes: String = "
scala> val aString = doublequotes + "treatme a string" + doublequotes
aString: String = "treatme a string"

In the preceding code, we used our doublequotes as prefix and suffix to our string treatme a string, and get a response.

We've a list of escape sequence characters shown in the following table:

You can also use the hex code to represent a Character literal, but we need to put a \u preceding it:

scala> val c = '\u0101'
c: Char = ā