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Unfortunately, the class StringLiteral is an abstract class for all string literals, including literal strings with interpolation. Not all interpolated strings can be computed at compile time, so we couldn't always convert every string literal to a Dart string.

However, the subclass SimpleStringLiteral, which represents a string literal that does not use interpolation, already has a method ('getValue()' in Java, probably translated into a getter named 'value' in the Dart version) that will do what you want.

In addition, there is a class named ConstantEvaluator that will do partial evaluation of constant expressions. There is an internal class that does full evaluation of constant expressions given a fully resolved AST, but I haven't had time yet to provide a decent public API to it.

So, we have, or will have, support for converting some string literals to native strings, just not as a method on StringLiteral. I'll leave this issue open as a reminder to add the public API for computing the values of compile time constant expressions. Let me know if that won't meet your needs.

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https://github.com/dart-lang/sdk/blob/master/pkg/analyzer/lib/dart/ast/ast.dart#L6938..L6942

abstract class StringLiteral extends Literal {
  /**
   * Return the value of the string literal, or `null` if the string is not a
   * constant string without any string interpolation.
   */
  String get stringValue;
}

Close?