compress

Makes a copy of a string replacing C string-style escape sequences with their one byte equivalent:

• `\b` → U+0008 Backspace
• `\f` → U+000C Form Feed
• `\n` → U+000A Line Feed
• `\r` → U+000D Carriage Return
• `\t` → U+0009 Horizontal Tabulation
• `\v` → U+000B Vertical Tabulation
• `\` followed by one to three octal digits → the numeric value (mod 256)
• `\` followed by any other character → the character as is. For example, `\\` will turn into a backslash (`\`) and `\"` into a double quote (`"`).

[func@GLib.strescape] does the reverse conversion.

Example: Unescape special characters:

public static int main () {
	// Output:
	//   ``	Oh please, don't call me human.``
	//   ``	Just "Doctor" would do very nicely, thank you.``
	string escaped = "\\tOh please, don't call me human.\\n\\tJust \\\"Doctor\\\" would do very nicely, thank you.".compress ();
	print ("%s\n", escaped);
	return 0;
}

valac --pkg glib-2.0 string.compress.vala

Parameters:

source

a string to compress

Returns:

a newly-allocated copy of source with all escaped character compressed