Escape character

An escape character is like a special word that you can use in certain situations when you are writing something on a computer. It helps the computer understand what you mean and it tells it to do something special.

For example, let's say you are writing a sentence and you want to include a quotation mark. But when you type the quotation mark, the computer thinks you are finished with the sentence and it doesn't understand what you want to do. So you need to use an escape character before the quotation mark in order to tell the computer to keep reading the sentence and to keep the quotation mark as part of the sentence.

The escape character is usually a backslash (\) and it basically means "hey computer, don't do your normal thing, I want you to do something else." So if you type a backslash before the quotation mark, like this: "I said \"hello\"", the computer will understand that you want to include the quotation mark in the sentence.

Escape characters can also be used in different situations, like when you want to include special characters in a password or when you want to type in different languages that use unique characters. So they are really helpful tools that help us communicate with computers in a way that they understand.