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?

Substitute ( text ; "" ; "~" )

'' is the escape character

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?

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

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

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.

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

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

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

" 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 ...