I found this regarding how the C preprocessor should handle string literal concatenation (phase 6). However, I can not find anything regarding how this is handled in C++ (does C++ use the C preprocessor?). The reason I ask is that I have the following: const char * Foo::encoding = "\0" "1234567890\0abcdefg"; where encoding is a static member of class Foo. Without the availability of concatenation I wouldnt be able to write that sequence of characters like that. const char * Foo::encoding = "\01234567890\0abcdefg"; Is something entirely different due to the way \012 is interpreted. I dont have access to multiple platforms and I'm curious how confident I should be that the above is always handled correctly - i.e. I will always get { 0, '1', '2', '3', ... }