The backslash character serves several purposes in Maple: as a continuation character, as an inert separator, and as an escape character to introduce control characters.

In 2-D math, characters that are shortcut keys must be escaped.  To do this, type a backslash followed by the character.  For more information, see the section Escaping Characters that are Shortcut Keys in 2-D Math Shortcut Keys and Hints.

When a backslash character appears as the last character on an input line, whether typed at the Maple command line, or read from a file, the backslash, and the following line ending, is ignored. In other words, the subsequent line is treated as a continuation of the current line.

When a backslash occurs in the middle of a sequence of characters that is contained within double quotes (") or backquotes (`) and it is immediately followed by one of the following characters, the corresponding control character is introduced (if applicable):

When a backslash occurs in the middle of a sequence of characters that is contained within double quotes or backquotes and it is not followed by one of the previously listed characters, the backslash is simply ignored.

The sequence \x must be immediately followed by two hexadecimal digits (0 through 9, A through F, or a through f). Any two digits except 00 are permissible. Values above 7F will display in a platform and character set dependent manner.

The backslash is ignored if it occurs within numbers. Therefore, when entering long numbers, the backslash can be used to separate groups of digits for improved readability.

Note to Windows users: when typing filenames, which use the backslash as a directory separator, you can either type each backslash as two backslashes, or you can use forward slashes.

On input lines beginning with the ! (shell command) or ? (help command) characters, backslashes are not processed by Maple. For ! lines, the backslashes are passed on to the underlying operating system shell as part of the command. (Refer to escape for more information). For ? lines, the backslash is treated literally. That is, ?\ displays this help page.

`x\y`;

3.14159\26535\89793\23846;

abcdefghijklm := 67;

12 + abcdef
ghijklm;

"This sentence contains\na line break";

`This sentence is noisy on text-based versions of Maple\a`;

"This contains\x0Aa line break and some 8-bit characters: \x9A \xBC";

for i to 5 do printf("\t%d\t%2d\n",i,i^2) end do;

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    4    16
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