Subject: Re: readable syntax for control characters in strings From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no> Date: 1996/10/31 Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3055740448244280@naggum.no> * Barry Margolin <barmar@tools.bbnplanet.com> | No. thanks. given that a syntax familiar to Emacs Lisp (and C) users is unavailable, how would one accomplish the same goal: to embed a (named) control character in a literal string in source code that is likely to travel across all sorts of information-losing channels? for an arbitrary character, either of the following forms produce the desired result, but I find them clumsy. do others do something else? #.(format nil "foo~Cbar" #\Newline) #.(concatenate 'string "foo" '(#\Newline) "bar") (incidentally, my actual problem case involves lots of escape sequences for a form printer now written in Emacs Lisp with the `cl' package. it is trivially portable to Common Lisp except for the string literals.) I feel I must have overlooked something or think in the wrong terms. #\Erik -- Those who do not know Lisp are doomed to reimplement it.