How to escape String literal in Java using Eclipse IDE

Whenever you paste String in Eclipse which contains escape characters, to store in a String variable or just as String literal it will ask to manually escape special characters like single quotes, double quotes, forward slash etc. This problem is more prominent when you are pasting large chunk of data which contains escape characters like a whole HTML or XML file, which contains lots of single quotes e.g. �� and double quotes �� along with forward slash on closing tags. It�s very hard to manually escape all those characters and its pretty annoying as well. While writing JUnit test for XML documents, parsing and processing I prefer to have whole XML file as String in Unit test, which pointed me to look for that feature in Eclipse. As I said earlier in my post Top 30 Eclipse keyboard shortcuts, I always look to find new shortcut and settings in Eclipse which help to automate repetitive task. Thankfully Eclipse has one setting which automatically escapes text as soon as you paste it. This is even more useful if you prefer to copy file path and just paste it, Since windows uses forward slash it automatically escape that instead of you going manually and escaping them. By default this setting is disabled in Eclipse IDE and you need to enable it.

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