How do I break a string over multiple lines?

Question

In YAML, I have a string that\'s very long. I want to keep this within the 80-column (or so) view of my editor, so I\'d like to break the string. What\'s the syntax for this

Answer 1

For situations were the string might contain spaces or not, I prefer double quotes and line continuation with backslashes:

key: "String \
  with long c\
  ontent"

But note about the pitfall for the case that a continuation line begins with a space, it needs to be escaped (because it will be stripped away elsewhere):

key: "String\
  \ with lon\
  g content"

If the string contains line breaks, this needs to be written in C style \n.

See also this question.