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I strongly oppose to using the escape character (tilde) for this purpose, as I've just written in Creole1.0Poll.

Space

This requires that a nowiki block have no leading spaces to start

Irrelevant, but nice for symmetry.

and no leading spaces to end. So, the triple curly braces must start the line. Therefore, if you want to display triple curly braces within a nowiki block, you would put a space in front of them, since only triple curly braces at the beginning of a line end a nowiki block.

Yes, this was adopted a long time ago.

This solution also

Why "also" ?

makes it impossible to display closing triple curly braces inline.

Wrong, it's possible with greedy nowiki, as it was adopted a long time ago too.

Tilde

Another method is to display the triple curly braces if a tilde is put in front of them like }}}.

Then you must escape all tildes, which is painful since tildes are quite common in many programming languages. And if you use the escape character only to escape braces and tildes, it's close to the normal escape character, but not quite; an overly complicated difference.

This is the way JSPWiki works and therefore is Not New.

How does it solve this problem?

-- YvesPiguet, 2007-Jun-21

Sorry if my tone was overly dramatic, but this rule:

To include closing braces where they might be considered as nowiki or preformatted end tag, there is one additional rule that works for both inline and block: three closing curly brackets preceded by a tilde are escaped (although otherwise tildes do not escape in nowiki)

does not allow for the sequence tilde+three closing braces at the beginning of a line.

Making tests in the JSPWiki sandbox, the tilde works like spaces in the current Creole: one tilde is removed when followed by three closing braces (but it's removed anywhere in block or inline nowiki). So it's a completely different kind of escape character than what we have at other places. BTW, JSPWiki and Creole would be incompatible anyway, in the way leading spaces are used.

More tests in JSPWiki sandbox (I'll use ( and ) instead of braces here to make sure the output is what I want), in inline nowiki:

  • the tilde escapes three braces, not one: (((foo ~))) bar))) -> foo ))) bar, and (((foo ~) bar))) -> foo ~) bar
  • how to have one trailing brace? I don't know: (((foo )))) -> foo ) (with last brace outside nowiki), i.e. no greediness as in the current Creole; but (((foo ~)))) etc. -> foo )))) etc. with unterminated nowiki

So trying to solve the very uncommon case where we have three closing braces in the middle of nowiki, we break (if we follow JSPWiki) the very common case where we have one trailing brace.

-- YvesPiguet, 2007-Jun-21

What JSPWiki does is that a tilde disables the next directive, not the next character. If the next characters do not form a directive, the tilde is left as-is. Therefore one trailing brace you get simply by adding a single brace (separated with a whitespace), e.g. (((foo) ))) . Now, since the JSPWiki parser is not based on a proper grammar (it's more of an adhoc stream parser), I wouldn't exactly rely on it as a model example for Creole. So it's better to define a good, solid, escape strategy and spec instead of relying on how JSPWiki happens to be working ;-)

BTW, the one trailing brace is not common. Never seen it anywhere, except in this discussion. Please provide proof of it being a very common case. However, in this wiki, I have seen several examples of triple braces in the middle of a nowiki block.

Yes, JSPWiki and Creole are incompatible. This is fine. It is not our intent to support mixed markup anyway.

-- JanneJalkanen, 2007-Jun-21

Thanks for the insight, Janne.

Since braces are very common in C, C++, Java, JavaScript, PHP and other languages, we should expect code fragments such as while (!done) { doWork(); } or class Foo { int i; } . Spaces can indeed be used for disambiguation, but (i) one of the reasons mentionned by proponents of the escape character in nowiki was to avoid this use of the space, and (ii) this introduces a superfluous space in the character stream, such as before the dot in the previous sentence. I think another case where the problem occurs is a trailing tilde, e.g. when explaining that in most unix shells, the home directory is represented by ~ .

-- YvesPiguet, 2007-Jun-21

Today I tried researching how other wikis escape the end of nowiki blocks and I discovered that none of them do! Do any wiki engines escape the closing tag of a nowiki block (besides JSPWiki) ?

-- ChuckSmith, 2007-Jun-26

As I wrote on Talk.AddNoWikiEscapeProposal, in my opinion there should be no escape character but the raw fragments should be put in a separate page (not accessed directly) and instead transcluded

-- DanieleC., 2007-Jul-05

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