Scala – Data Types | Scala Basic Literals | Escape Sequences

Scala has all the same data types as Java, with the same memory footprint and precision. Following is the table giving details about all the data types available in Scala −

All the data types listed above are objects. There are no primitive types like in Java. This means that you can call methods on an Int, Long, etc.

Scala Basic Literals

The rules Scala uses for literals are simple and intuitive. This section explains all basic Scala Literals.

Integral Literals

Integer literals are usually of type Int, or of type Long when followed by a L or l suffix. Here are some integer literals −

0
035
21 
0xFFFFFFFF 
0777L

Floating Point Literal

Floating point literals are of type Float when followed by a floating point type suffix F or f, and are of type Double otherwise. Here are some floating point literals −

0.0 
1e30f 
3.14159f 
1.0e100
.1

Boolean Literals

The Boolean literals true and false are members of type Boolean.

Symbol Literals

A symbol literal ‘x is a shorthand for the expression scala.Symbol(“x”). Symbol is a case class, which is defined as follows.

package scala
final case class Symbol private (name: String) {
   override def toString: String = "'" + name
}

Character Literals

A character literal is a single character enclosed in quotes. The character is either a printable Unicode character or is described by an escape sequence. Here are some character literals −

'a' 
'\u0041'
'\n'
'\t'

String Literals

A string literal is a sequence of characters in double quotes. The characters are either printable Unicode character or are described by escape sequences. Here are some string literals −

"Hello,\nWorld!"
"This string contains a \" character."

Multi-Line Strings

A multi-line string literal is a sequence of characters enclosed in triple quotes “”” … “””. The sequence of characters is arbitrary, except that it may contain three or more consecutive quote characters only at the very end.

Characters must not necessarily be printable; newlines or other control characters are also permitted. Here is a multi-line string literal −

"""the present string
spans three
lines."""

Null Values

The null value is of type scala.Null and is thus compatible with every reference type. It denotes a reference value which refers to a special “null” object.

Escape Sequences

The following escape sequences are recognized in character and string literals.

A character with Unicode between 0 and 255 may also be represented by an octal escape, i.e., a backslash ‘\’ followed by a sequence of up to three octal characters. Following is the example to show few escape sequence characters −

Example

object Test {
   def main(args: Array[String]) {
      println("Hello\tWorld\n\n" );
   }
} 

When the above code is compiled and executed, it produces the following result −

Output

Hello   World