Why you should care
Continuing a string across a linebreak is supported in most script engines, but it is not a part of ECMAScript. Additionally, the whitespace at the beginning of each line can’t be safely stripped at compile time, and any whitespace after the slash will result in tricky errors.
How we detect
CAST Highlight counts one occurrence each time a multiline string is encountered, that is a string containing newline preceded by “\”.
Bad Code
var myString = 'A rather long string of English text, an error message \ actually that just keeps going and going -- an error \ message to make the Energizer bunny blush (right through \ those Schwarzenegger shades)! Where was I? Oh yes, \ you\'ve got an error and all the extraneous whitespace is \ just gravy. Have a nice day.'; // Noncompliant
Good Code
var myString = 'A rather long string of English text, an error message ' + 'actually that just keeps going and going -- an error ' + 'message to make the Energizer bunny blush (right through ' + 'those Schwarzenegger shades)! Where was I? Oh yes, ' + 'you\'ve got an error and all the extraneous whitespace is ' + 'just gravy. Have a nice day.';
References
About CAST and Highlight’s Code Insights
Over the last 25 years, CAST has leveraged unique knowledge on software quality measurement by analyzing thousands of applications and billions of lines of code. Based on this experience and community standards on programming best practices, Highlight implements hundreds of code insights across 15+ technologies to calculate health factors of a software.