quote marks
Gnuplot uses three forms of quote marks for delimiting text strings,
double-quote (ascii 34), single-quote (ascii 39), and backquote (ascii 96).
File names may be entered in either single or double quotes.
String constants and text strings used for labels, titles, or other plot
elements may be enclosed in either single quotes or double quotes.
Further processing of the quoted text depends on the choice of quote marks.
Single and double quoted strings differ as follows
- Backslash processing of special characters \n (newline) \r (return) and
\t (tab) is performed only for double-quoted strings.
- In single-quoted strings, backslashes are just ordinary characters.
To get a single-quote in a single-quoted string, it must be doubled. Thus the strings "d\" s' b\\" and 'd" s'' b\' are completely equivalent.
- Unicode escape sequences \U+xxxx are processed for both single-quoted and
double-quoted strings.
- Enhanced text processing can be used for both double-quoted text and
single-quoted text.
- Octal escape sequences \ooo are processed in single-quoted strings only
if enhanced text is enabled. Octal escapes are always process in double-quoted strings.
Back-quotes are used to enclose system commands for substitution into the
command line. See substitution.