Tabs in non formated print statements not working

[TheGrandmother]

Using tabs in print statements does not work.
Having say print(" lol") or print " lol" where the spaces are a tab (\t) will generate the following compiler error: unexpected "\"".

But.. It works if one uses a formatted print like this print(" lol{}",1).

[supercooldave]

You are certainly finding all the things we wouldn't even consider testing.
Which is a good thing.

[TheGrandmother]

That is the nice/annoying thing with beta testing.

[supercooldave]

It is very much appreciated.

[kaeluka]

Confirmed that this is still a bug.

[TobiasWrigstad]

Albert, can you fix this? Can't be that hard…

[albertnetymk]

Yes, I can try.

[TobiasWrigstad]

Thanks. Please request help from one of the resident Haskell gods (@EliasC, @kaeluka‚ …) if needed.

[EliasC]

This seems to be an issue with the parsing library! The documentation for stringLiteral says

This lexeme parser parses a literal string. Returns the literal string value. This parsers deals correctly with escape sequences and gaps. The literal string is parsed according to the grammar rules defined in the Haskell report (which matches most programming languages quite closely).

and it seems to keep its promise - a string literal with a literal tab character (i.e. not \t, but an actual tab) will not compile under GHC!

I cannot get the formatted print string example to work either, so currently we don't support literal tabs (just as we don't support literal newlines) in string literals. Not sure if we should count this as bug or just a narrow minded grammar? I would be fine with closing this.

On a related note, I like Python where you can go

s1 = "this string cannot contain linebreaks"
s2 = 
"""
This is a 
multi-line
string literal
"""

[EliasC]

Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but I'd like to clarify that the string "\t" is valid while " " is not (the string consists of a single tab). Just like you can write

let s = "\n" in ...

but not

let s = "
" in ...

[TheGrandmother]

@EliasC
Sorry. I completely forgot what bug it was that I had reported a year back :P

[EliasC]

So are you happy with the current functionality? :)

[TheGrandmother]

Yes. The current functionality is satisfactory :)

[EliasC]

Then I'll close this issue, and anyone who is against it can re-open it!