Stupid question?

[Matt Klein]

I want to substitute for all the "" characters in a text string. I tried doing it like this:

Substitute(text; ""; "~")

That doesn't work because FileMaker sees """ as a literal quote mark and won't accept "".

Anyone?

[mr_vodka]

Substitute ( text ; "" ; "~" )

'' is the escape character

[Matt Klein]

Substitute ( text ; "" ; "~" )

'' is the escape character

Thank you very much mr vodka. I am not sure I fully understand the meaning of escape character and it's implications. Can you enlighten me?

[Lee Smith]

Escaping a character, simply means you are telling the application program, FileMaker in this case, to treat the character as Text, and not an operator.

HTH

Lee

[mr_vodka]

There are special characters with every programing language. Since FileMaker uses scripting, there are special characters for FileMaker too.

The symbol is a special character because it is used to escape (meaning escaping its special features and take it as a literal).

So by having The first one is used to escape the special character ''; thus taking the second one as a literal text

[Ted S]

I wonder why the backslash character was chosen to be the escape character since it is so commonly used in file paths. It seems to introduce needless complexity into everyday tasks. I would have thought that a less used character would have been a better choice but there may be a good reason for using the backslash.

[mr_vodka]

Hmmm. dunno. But the backslash is a known common escape character in other applications.

[T-Square]

Keep in mind that the backslash as file/path designator is a Windows feature.

The backslash as escape character goes back to early UNIX environments, and (according to the wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backslash) was introduced in 1960. It has been used in numerous programming languages as the escape character. UNIX regular expressions make use of the backslash; so do most major programming environments, including C and C++.

David

[Ted S]

Hmmmmm, maybe I should redirect the question to Mr. Gates; how come you used the backslash character as a separator in the file path?

[LaRetta]

" Keep in mind that the backslash as file/path designator is a Windows feature"

"I should redirect the question to Mr. Gates; how come you used the backslash character as a separator in the file path?"

Backslash is NOT a Windows feature. Backslash goes back to the DOS command line and Microsoft simply continued it (ummm, DOS does still exist). You could say the backslash is an IBM compatible (pre-windows) feature. What Microsoft did which caused the most trouble (back then) was introduce long file names which broke the 8.3 file limitations. I remember those days ... that was a rough transition for many of us ...