[Pmwiki-users] Re: "null characters" or "pattern breaking characters"

Christian Ridderström chr
Sat Jan 10 16:45:29 CST 2004


On Fri, 9 Jan 2004, Patrick R. Michaud wrote:

> John Rankin had proposed (and uses) backticks (`) as a null token to break
> patterns and prevent things from being treated as WikiWords.

I'm actually using the John's backtick and I like them alot for 
easily escaping WikiWords. But the backtick only works with WikiWords 
IRCC, and this is also how I think they should work.

The null-token is more of a general purpose solution, that'll guarantee 
to break any pattern. I've thought about using the backtick as a 
null-token, but backticks are used in for instance the help text's of
Emacs lisp-files and in Maple files...

In addition, how would you actually print a backtick?
Using [=`=]? I think you'd get other problems doing that.
Maybe an exception could be made for translating '``' into a '`' but I 
think that could be confusing. And you still couldn't easily quote for 
instance Emacs lisp files.

  The original 
> thread begins at 
> http://pmichaud.com/pipermail/pmwiki-users_pmichaud.com/2003-April/000364.html .
> There was also some further discussion in the thread starting at
> http://contra.vosn.net/pipermail/pmwiki-users_pmichaud.com/2003-May/000471.html
> 
> I like the backtick better than any other sequence or idea I've seen
> proposed.  Any comments/suggestions from others?  I'd really be interested
> to hear John's comments and experiences on this.

IMO the backtick and the null-token are for slightly different purposes, 
where the functionality of the null-token includes the functionality of 
the backtick.

/Christian

> > I've added notes about this here:
> > 	http://www.pmichaud.com/wiki/Test/NullToken


-- 
Dr. Christian Ridderstr?m, +46-8-768 39 44       http://www.md.kth.se/~chr




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