Editing 234: Escape Artist
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{{w|Harry Houdini}} (born Erik Weisz/Ehrich Weiss) was a famous escape artist, whose more famous routines included escaping straitjackets and switching places with an assistant while locked inside a box. | {{w|Harry Houdini}} (born Erik Weisz/Ehrich Weiss) was a famous escape artist, whose more famous routines included escaping straitjackets and switching places with an assistant while locked inside a box. | ||
| − | The word "escape" also has a meaning {{w|Escape character|in computer science}}. To "escape" something in programming means to replace a character or character sequence | + | The word "escape" also has a meaning {{w|Escape character|in computer science}}. To "escape" something in programming means to replace a character or character sequence which would usually have a special meaning with another character sequence that doesn't have this special meaning. One common way of escaping is to have a special escape character which removes the special meaning from whatever character follows it. For instance, many programming languages enclose text strings in quotation marks (e.g. <code>"this is a string"</code>). If you tried to directly put a quotation mark inside the string, the compiler would interpret it as the end of the string. To avoid this, the quotation mark is ''escaped'' with a backslash: <code>"He said, \"Goodbye!\", and went away."</code> |
The problem [[Cueball]] is having is related to the fact that {{w|Bash (Unix shell)|the Bash shell}} interprets spaces as a special syntactic marker, when he actually just wants the spaces to be literal space characters. In this case, escaping the spaces with \ would force Bash to interpret his script in this way. | The problem [[Cueball]] is having is related to the fact that {{w|Bash (Unix shell)|the Bash shell}} interprets spaces as a special syntactic marker, when he actually just wants the spaces to be literal space characters. In this case, escaping the spaces with \ would force Bash to interpret his script in this way. | ||
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The person talking to Cueball is having a separate conversation about Houdini as Cueball thinks aloud about his script issue, which results in diverging conversations. This eventually leads Cueball to suggest that Houdini might have "escaped" (freed himself from) handcuffs by "escaping" (removing the special meaning from) them with backslashes. | The person talking to Cueball is having a separate conversation about Houdini as Cueball thinks aloud about his script issue, which results in diverging conversations. This eventually leads Cueball to suggest that Houdini might have "escaped" (freed himself from) handcuffs by "escaping" (removing the special meaning from) them with backslashes. | ||
| − | Sometimes, escape characters need to be "nested" - the backslash character itself can be escaped as \\ to produce a literal backslash, so if, for example, one needs to produce a literal quotation mark to output to a script file, and that script file ''also'' needs to have the quotation mark escaped, one would need to type it out as \\\", which would be output as \". If I needed to actually output that \\\", one would need to type it as \\\\\\\". The number of backslashes needed grows, and can be very hard to keep track of (see [[1638: Backslashes]]). This behavior is a type of n-level nested quotation mentioned in the title text | + | Sometimes, escape characters need to be "nested" - the backslash character itself can be escaped as \\ to produce a literal backslash, so if, for example, one needs to produce a literal quotation mark to output to a script file, and that script file ''also'' needs to have the quotation mark escaped, one would need to type it out as \\\", which would be output as \". If I needed to actually output that \\\", one would need to type it as \\\\\\\". The number of backslashes needed grows, and can be very hard to keep track of (see [[1638: Backslashes]]). This behavior is a type of n-level nested quotation mentioned in the title text. |
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An {{w|iron maiden (torture device)|iron maiden}} is supposedly a medieval torture device, currently believed to have been invented for tourism purposes much later than the time period when it was said to have been used. | An {{w|iron maiden (torture device)|iron maiden}} is supposedly a medieval torture device, currently believed to have been invented for tourism purposes much later than the time period when it was said to have been used. | ||
