Escape Sequences

We already met one escape sequence in Hello World!. It was the \n at the end of the first printf. There are several escape sequences in C. Below is a table listing all of them.

Escape sequence	Name	Meaning	Example
\n	Newline	Moves to the next line	Hello\nWorld
\t	Horizontal tab	Inserts a horizontal tab	Hello\tWorld
\v	Vertical tab	Inserts a vertical tab	Hello\vWorld
\b	Backspace	Moves back one character position	Hello\bWorld
\r	Carriage return	Moves to the start of the current line	Hello\rWorld
\f	Form feed	Represents a form-feed character	Hello\fWorld
\a	Alert	Requests an alert signal	\a
\\	Backslash	Prints a backslash	\\ → \
\'	Single quote	Represents a single quote	\' → '
\"	Double quote	Represents a double quote	\" → "
\?	Question mark	Represents a question mark	\? → ?
\0	Null character	Represents a character with value zero	'\0'
\ooo	Octal escape	Represents a character using octal digits	\101 → A
\xhh	Hexadecimal escape	Represents a character using hexadecimal digits	\x41 → A
\uXXXX	Unicode escape	Represents a Unicode character using four hexadecimal digits	\u00A9 → ©
\UXXXXXXXX	Unicode escape	Represents a Unicode character using eight hexadecimal digits	\U0001F600 → 😀

Difference Between \n and \r

The \n indicates a new line, while \r means a carriage return. But what does a carriage return mean in C? Consider this example code:

#include <stdio.h>
 
int main(void) {
  printf("ABCDEFGHIJKLMNO\r");
  printf("XYZ\n");
  return 0;
}

The output is

XYZDEFGHIJKLMNO

When \n is seen, it just moves the cursor to the beginning of a new line, vertically. \r, on the other hand, moves the cursor to the beginning of the current line, horizontally. Below is how it works.

Step 1: Original text
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNO

Step 2: After \r (cursor returns to beginning)
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNO
^
Step 3: Print XYZ (overwrites first 3 characters)
XYZDEFGHIJKLMNO
   ^

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