C Escape Character Conversion

escape-f converts the common C escape characters in a string to Fortran characters, so that we can write code like this:

print *, escape("Hello,\n\tworld!\n&
                & I'm Fortran!")

Instead of, inconveniently:

print *, "Hello,"//achar(10)//achar(9)//"world!"//new_line("a")//&
         " I'm Fortran!"

Thus, it is convenient for us to use the C escape character style to write the whole string in series in some scenarios, to achieve common functions such as line feed and carriage return, which are generally used to output strings to the screen or text files. escape-f enables OpenMP parallelism and uses built-in functions, so in a large number of string conversions, you can also get high performance.

Supported C escape characters

Escape character	Meaning	Implementation
\a	Alarm or Beep	✔️
\b	Backspace	✔️
\f	Form Feed	✔️
\n	New Line	✔️
\r	Carriage Return	✔️
\t	Horizontal Tab	✔️
\v	Vertical Tab	✔️
\0	NULL	✔️
\?	Question Mark	✔️
\'	Single Quote	✔️
\"	Double Quote	✔️
\\	Backlash	✔️
\ddd	Octal Number	❌
\xhh	Hexadecimal Number	❌

Warning

\0 has no significant meaning in Fortran, and escape-f removes it from the string.

Usage

Only support fpm build, other build tools please copy the source code, the code in ifort/ifx/gfortran test passed.

Using escape-f in the fpm project, add the following to fpm.toml:

[dependencies]
escape-f = { git = "https://github.com/zoziha/escape-f" }

Use in Fortran code:

fpm run --example --all

program example_escape

    use escape_module, only: escape
    implicit none

    print *, escape("Hello, \n\v\tworld!\n\0")
    print *, escape("Hello,\n&
                &\tworld!\n&
                & I'm Fortran!")

end program example_escape
!> Hello, 
!>
!>       world!
!>
!> Hello,
!>        world!
!> I'm Fortran!

Document

Generate and open the FORD document:

ford FORD-doc.md
start build/ford/index.html     # Windows Open the web page

Related string libraries

• Fortty: Create colorful terminal applications in Fortran.
• Fortran-regex: Fortran port of the tiny-regex-c library.
• M_strings: Fortran string manipulations.