I can't find any documentation for what characters should be escaped in a wiki.
Here is what I have been able to infer:
| ' [ | two or more times for wiki formatting |
| { | two or more times for wiki features |
| : * # | (in the first column) for indents/lists |
| = | (in the first column?) for headings |
| - | (in the first column?) four times for a horizontal rule |
| ~ | three or more times for a signature |
| # | sometimes prefixes key words like REDIRECT |
| < | (less-than) should be ampersand-l-t-semicolon |
The current tips, imported from html, break the wiki rules in a few places, and have many other characters escaped.
When you edit some tips, you see a blizzard of *lt; *gt; *amp; *#35; (I've used * instead of ampersand here - that's less-than, greater-than, ampersand, hash).
The character escaping makes editing some tips pretty hard. Following the "be bold" policy, I have removed all escapes, other than less-than, from a couple of tips.
Now I'm getting nervous. What do you think?
Can you add anything to my list of reserved characters?
It would be nice to have a definitive list of reserved characters, and some Vim techniques for finding and handling problems.
JohnBeckett 09:20, 14 June 2007 (UTC)
- The pipe character | seems special as well, it needed escaping in VimTip639 for example. Ipkiss 10:18, 21 July 2007 (UTC)
- Thanks for joining in. Yes, I've learnt about pipe since writing the above. The problem is that the body of a tip is actually the 'text' parameter of Template:Tip. Therefore, the body must not break the rules for a template parameter. To insert a pipe you need to use the {{!}} template. I'm busy trying other things now, but I hope to get back to this point one day and find out whether there is any benefit from having the tip body as the 'text' parameter. --JohnBeckett 10:32, 21 July 2007 (UTC)