.
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
A bit selfish, maybe... but tilde is one of the most difficult characters to get on Italian keyboards.
-- Michele Tomaiuolo, 2007-02-26
Yes, it's difficult on German keyboards too, but this character is for EdgeCases - in the seldom cases you need it, it is acceptable (IMHO).
-- Christoph Sauer, 2007-02-26
I still have trouble understanding what is the scope of a single escape character in the source. It seems to be fuzzy at least. For example, if I write {{foo}}}}}, how many closing curly braces will be escaped? The idea that the escape character applies to single "element of markup" is evil, because it requires the users to understand the inner workings of the parser -- the "element of markup" will vary depending on thei mplementation too. Another objection I have is that I tested the escape character here on the JSPWiki a little, and I must say it doesn't always work -- it only works for the markup that somebody thought to include. This is a big problem in my opinion. -- RadomirDopieralski, 20070-02-27