Subject: Re: Escaping in strings
From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.net>
Date: Mon, 12 Nov 2001 03:49:05 GMT
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Message-ID: <3214525744108869@naggum.net>

* Thomas Strathmann
| First of all, forgive me, if this is a trivial and stupid question but I am
| really stuck at this point (just in the process of learning things):
| I need to pass the string "\304" but the \ is just left out by the reader.
| \\ like in C does not have the desired effect and everything else does not
| do anything useful either... Please help me.

  If you want to write in C, I think actually writing in C is your best bet
  for the "desired effect".  If you want to know what the "desired effect"
  _should_ be when you are writing in _any_ programming language, you need
  to be looking for that rules of that language, not some other.  E.g., if
  a language decides to mimic C in some ways, it is a rule of that language.

  In Common Lisp, a string is delimited by "", within which a \ will escape
  the following \ or ".  A symbol name may be delimited by || within which
  a \ will escape the following \ or |.  Outside of either, a \ will cause
  the next character to be considered a constituent character of a symbol
  name regardless of any other traits it might have had.  That is all.
  
///
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