Creating snippets with quotation marks inside

Question

I have some code with quotation marks that I want to use as a snippet. Unfortunately, JSON requires me to use them in "body" array in my settings. I tried to use different types of quotation marks, but Visual Studio highlights it in red: enter image description here

What can I do to include quotation marks in my snippet?

Answer 1

Use \ to escape the double quotes. A sample snippet looks like this:

"My quoted snippet": {
 "prefix": "quot",
 "body": [
 "Hello \"User\""
 ],
 "description": "Print snippets with quotes"
}

When you execute this snippet it will print: Hello "User"

• Toni Leigh: This doesn't work: Invalid characters in string. Control characters must be escaped
• Zvezdochka: It doesn't work for me too. With other symbols to escape (for example $) \\ (double back slashes) help. But with " even \\ doesn't help.
• cdsaenz: Trying to translate some coffescript from Atom (which does handle quotes and double quotes perfectly). This trick does work for me at least in this example: "echo \"<pre>\";",

Answer 2

Use can simply use \ (backward slash) if you want to use double quotes or any other thing in json

Example :

"print statement":{
 "prefix": "print",
 "body": "print(\"1ドル\")",
 "description": "print anything in python"
}

Answer 3

I was hoping there was a online converter available for this purpose to convert the code to correctly encoded code, but seems noone did that as of yet...

Remember that json also needs escaping with \ so you might have to \ for it to work correctly, an example from #42669459 has this sollution:

What to encode: ${code}

Sollution:

"Return Code With Squirly And Dollar": {
 "prefix": "code_snippet",
 "body" : [
 "\\${code\\}"
 ],
 "description": "Code Snippet"
}

Answer 4

My environment is Visual Studio 2022.

I wanted to create a snippet that produces the following line of code:

_logger.LogInformation($"")

The following worked for me

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<CodeSnippets xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/2005/CodeSnippet">
 <CodeSnippet Format="1.0.0">
 <Header>
 <Title>logger information</Title>
 <Shortcut>loginfo</Shortcut>
 </Header>
 <Snippet>
 <Code Language="CSharp">
 <![CDATA[_logger.LogInformation($$" ");]]>
 </Code>
 <Imports>
 <Import>
 
 </Import>
 </Imports>
 </Snippet>
 </CodeSnippet>
</CodeSnippets>

Answer 5

I don't know if you used tabs in your real snippet, but if yes, this answer fixed my issue.
You can replace tabs characters by spaces, or maybe use \t instead.

Answer 6

Maybe this will help someone, I found that I getting an "invalid escape character" message but the problem was with a path rather than the double quotes themselves. Here's what I ended up doing and it works fine.

"body": "<cfdump var=\"#arguments#\" output=\"C:\\webmx\\www\\myDump.html\" format=\"html\">",

Answer 7

Using @Wosi 's answer to create a snippet that creates a snippet template.

We covert this:

 "snip": {
 "prefix": "snip",
 "body": [
 ""
 ],
 "description": "Template to create a new snippet"
 },

INTO:

 "snip": {
 "prefix": "snip",
 "body": [
 "\"1ドル\": { "
 " \"prefix\": \"1ドル\", "
 " \"body\": [ "
 " \"2ドル\" "
 " ], "
 " \"description\": \"3ドル\" "
 "}, "
 ],
 "description": "Template to create a new snippet"
 },