contents/glyph/book/text_editing/esc_quot.html
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title: "Glyph – Escaping and Quoting"
content-type: page
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<p>Glyph doesn’t require any special control characters like LaTeX, and its macro syntax is very straightforward and liberal. This however comes with a price: because square brackets are used as delimiters, you must escape any square bracket in your text with a backslash. That’s not <em>too</em> bad if you think about it, unless you’re writing programming code, in which case escaping every single square bracket can be painful.</p>
<p>If a portion of your text contains an excessive amount of square brackets, you may consider using the <a href="/glyph/book/macros/macros_core.html#m_escape"><code>escape</code></a> macro (or its alias <code>.</code>) with the <code>[=</code> and <code>=]</code> delimiters. By itself, the escape macro doesn’t do anything: it just evaluates to its contents, but the special delimiters act as an escape for any square bracket within them. As a consequence, any macro within <code>[=</code> and <code>=]</code> will <em>not</em> be evaluated.</p>
<p>You can use the quoting delimiters with <em>any</em> macro identifier. Obviously, using them as delimiters for things like <a href="/glyph/book/macros/macros_structure.html#m_section"><code>section</code></a> macros may not be a good idea, but they should be more or less mandatory with the <a href="/glyph/book/macros/macros_block.html#m_codeblock"><code>codeblock</code></a> macro or the <a href="/glyph/book/macros/macros_filters.html#m_highlight"><code>highlight</code></a> macro, especially when it contains square brackets or even Glyph code, like this:</p>
<div class="CodeRay">
<div class="code"><pre><span class="line-numbers"> <a href="#n1" name="n1">1</a></span>codeblock[=
<span class="line-numbers"> <a href="#n2" name="n2">2</a></span> section[
<span class="line-numbers"> <a href="#n3" name="n3">3</a></span> @title[A section]
<span class="line-numbers"> <a href="#n4" name="n4">4</a></span> @id[test]
<span class="line-numbers"> <a href="#n5" name="n5">5</a></span>This is a section.
<span class="line-numbers"> <a href="#n6" name="n6">6</a></span> section[
<span class="line-numbers"> <a href="#n7" name="n7">7</a></span> @title[A nested section]
<span class="line-numbers"> <a href="#n8" name="n8">8</a></span>This is another section.
<span class="line-numbers"> <a href="#n9" name="n9">9</a></span> ]
<span class="line-numbers"><strong><a href="#n10" name="n10">10</a></strong></span> ]
<span class="line-numbers"><a href="#n11" name="n11">11</a></span>=]</pre></div>
</div>
<aside class="note">
<span class="note-title">Note</span>Although quoting delimiters allow you to use square brackets without escaping them, you must still escape them if you want to escape quoting delimiters themselves.
</aside>
<p>Besides square brackets, there are other characters that must or can be escaped with backslashes, as shown in the following table:</p>
<table>
<tr>
<th>Escape Sequence</th>
<th>Evaluates to...</th>
<th>Notes</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<code>\[</code>
</td>
<td>
<code>[</code>
</td>
<td>
Square brackets must be escaped unless used as macro delimiters or within a quoting macro.
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<code>\]</code>
</td>
<td>
<code>]</code>
</td>
<td>
Square brackets must be escaped unless used as macro delimiters or within a quoting macro.
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<code>\\</code>
</td>
<td>
<code>\</code>
</td>
<td>Backslashes do not have to be escaped by default, but an escaped backslash will evaluate to itself.</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<code>\=</code>
</td>
<td>
<code>=</code>
</td>
<td>Equal signs do not have to be escaped by default, but an escaped equal sign will evaluate to iself.</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<code>\|</code>
</td>
<td>
<code>|</code>
</td>
<td>Pipes must be escaped (even within quoting macros) unless they are used to separate macro parameters.</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<code>\/</code>
</td>
<td />
<td>An escaped dot evaluates to nothing. Useful to separate macro identifiers from other characters: <br /><code>_\/=>[#link|This link is emphasized using Textile]_ </code>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
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