How would I make a String which includes brackets? - java

Question

So when i try

String string1 = "{"needs_reward":false,"has_voted":false,"sites":[{"id":3922,"name":"RuneTopList","has_voted":false,"vote_url":"http://api.runetoplist.com/vote/out?siteid=3922"},{"id":4613,"name":"RuneLocus","has_voted":false,"vote_url":"http://api.runetoplist.com/vote/out?siteid=4613"},{"id":4339,"name":"UltimatePrivateServers","has_voted":true,"vote_url":"http://api.runetoplist.com/vote/out?siteid=4339"},{"id":4340,"name":"TopG","has_voted":true,"vote_url":"http://api.runetoplist.com/vote/out?siteid=4340"},{"id":4341,"name":"MMORPGToplist","has_voted":true,"vote_url":"http://api.runetoplist.com/vote/out?siteid=4341"},{"id":4622,"name":"Rune-Server","has_voted":true,"vote_url":"http://api.runetoplist.com/vote/out?siteid=4622"},{"id":4623,"name":"GTop100","has_voted":true,"vote_url":"http://api.runetoplist.com/vote/out?siteid=4623"},{"id":4828,"name":"GamingTopList","has_voted":true,"vote_url":"http://api.runetoplist.com/vote/out?siteid=4828"},{"id":4829,"name":"RSPS-List","has_voted":true,"vote_url":"http://api.runetoplist.com/vote/out?siteid=4829"},{"id":4861,"name":"Top100Arena","has_voted":true,"vote_url":"http://api.runetoplist.com/vote/out?siteid=4861"}]}"

I get errors because it contains brackets, how would i set this as a string? Thanks for the help.

Answer 1

The brackets aren't problem - the quotes are. For example, this is fine:

String braces = "{}";

The quote (") is used to terminate a string, so you need to escape it with a \:

String sentence = "My son said, \"Hello, world!\" and then ran away.";

That creates a string of:

My son said, "Hello, world!" and then ran away.

If you need a \ in your text, you need to escape that, too - but not forward slashes:

String slashes = "Backslash: \\ and forward slash: /";

You don't need to escape single quotes within a string, but you do need to escape them within a character literal (as ' would otherwise be the end of the literal):

String text = "I don't need a backslash";
char c = '\'';

I would encourage you not to store a lot of text directly in your code anyway though - it's generally more readable if you store it as text files which you load the data from at execution time.