strings tips language

13 Jun 2024

If you want to declare a string that is really long or spans over multiple lines, then swift makes it really easy to do so with multiline string literals.

The syntax to declare these strings are using the triple quotes “”” instead of the double “” quotes.

Let’s take an example where you had to declare a simple JSON that gives info about a Book.

let bookJSON = """
{
    "name": "Swift Programming Guide",
    "id": 12345,
    "author": "John Appleseed"
}
"""

In the above example the triple quotes tells the compiler that the string spans multiple lines and makes it more readable. Another advantage is that you can write the text within the triple quotes as if you were writing using a text editor, meaning all the indentations and line breaks will be honored making it easier to follow along.

For example, the same bookJSON string when using the regular double quotes would look something like this.

let bookJSON = "{ \"name\": \"Swift Programming\", \"id\": 12345, \"author\": \"John Appleseed\" }"

As we can see multiline string literals can be use to declare simple HTML, JSON or simple scripts easily making code more readable.

Multiline String Literals in Swift

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