Subject: Re: Escaping in strings From: Erik Naggum <email@example.com> Date: Mon, 12 Nov 2001 03:49:05 GMT Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <firstname.lastname@example.org> * 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. /// -- Norway is now run by a priest from the fundamentalist Christian People's Party, the fifth largest party representing one eighth of the electorate. -- Carrying a Swiss Army pocket knife in Oslo, Norway, is a criminal offense.