[pmwiki-users] Free markup character?

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Thu, Apr 06, 2006 at 10:25:50AM +1200, Allister Jenks wrote:
>    Help!
> 
>    I want to create a new markup that is very quick to type to style
>    individual words (or occasionally a couple of words).
> 
>    I tried ;this; and it works fine, but breaks the >><< markup!!  Looking at
>    my keyboard I can't see any symbols that have not yet been used except for
>    "?" (and I thought ";") and am too unfamiliar with regex to work out how
>    to create a safe markup.  I don't want any more than 2 characters either
>    side of the word(s) because I will be using it all over the place.  The
>    goal is to style the words blue and italic.
> 

By convention PmWiki has always explicitly reserved the '='
character for custom markup sequences.

>    Can anybody educate me on why I broke >><< by defining ";", and/or suggest
>    a suitable markup I could implement?
>
>    I had Markup("", "inline", "/;(.*?);/", "<span style='font-style:italic;
>    color:#0000c0;'>$1</span>");

It's probably not the semicolon that broke the markup...there
appear to be a couple of issues with the rule as written here:

1.  Every markup needs a name; I don't know how PmWiki will
react to using "" as a markup name.  (I suspect not well at all.)

2.  Semicolons occur in lots of places other than markup text. 
In particular, the string you're using to replace ";(.*?);" 
contains a pair of semicolons itself.  Since the replacement
string isn't escaped or preserved in any way, the semicolon
replacement pattern is probably being a bit over-eager and
adding <span> around any pair of semicolons it may happen to find --
even those that are coming from other HTML tags or other markups.

This last point is similar to the reason why it's difficult to do a
markup like /italic/ -- there are a lot of things that
have slashes in them that aren't intended to be italics,
such as urls  (http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/PmWiki), fractions (3/4),
and/or, closing HTML tags such as </b>, </span>, etc.

Pm