.
Theres already a Add No Wiki Escape Proposal, but this only discusses the use with nowiki and preformatted markup. This proposal could be a general discussion taking into consideration all markup elements as well as the exact definition of whitespace at the beginning of lines - they should have no meaning in creole and therefore not escaping anything.
-- ChristophSauer 2007-02-22
Gregor Hagedorn I dislike the use of backslash for this, since it will have to be escaped extremely frequently when a Wiki is used in the documenting or support of a Windows environment. Pathnames would then look like (Problem: How do I escape the triple-brace inside triple-brace text? O, the tilde seems to work, but is that Creole? - another argument why this proposal is essential!)
Look at: N:{{{\}}}Users{{{\}}}MailHelp ...
I propose to use tilde, which would be reasonable safe in my experience.
Sorry, I took the liberty to move your discussion here -- we use separate pages for talking. Hope you don't mind.
It's a normal practice to mark variables, formulas, code snippets and paths in the code. Given your example, you woudl write:
Look at: {{{N:\Users\MailHelp}}}...
You can put a triple closing curly brace in preformatted block without any problems in a real Creole parser -- see Add No Wiki Escape Proposal. You can also include a triple curly brace at the end of a nowiki span -- and open a new span immediately, if you need to put something more there.
As opposed to tilde, triple curly braces and backslashes never appear in normal text. Non-normal text, like paths, code, etc. has to be ascaped anyways -- otherwise it would be impossible to create any markup at all without a risk of conflicts. Tilde can be traditionally used to separate number ranges (especially with negative numbers), show approximate dates, etc. It was also proposed for subscript in Creole additions.
-- RadomirDopieralski, 2007-02-26