Markup View

Author: GreenMachine

Oct 23rd 2011 at 8:40:44 AM

Having a bit of programming experience, I recognize that these are escape characters, which are used in strings in order to have things like quotes and apostrophes in said strings. This is because both the single quote character and the double quote character are given special significance in many programming languages, in order to denote a character used as a character, and a sequence of characters used as a string literal. Escape characters (which are commonly the backslash character) are used before a given character to tell the parser either to strip the character of special meaning (as with the apostrophe), or to add special meaning (like the sequence 
, which typically tells the parser to start a new line). Note that two escape characters ([=\=], in this case) are usually treated as one of the escape characters that have been stripped of its meaning.

However, even though escape characters are added when the laconic is edited, they are not parsed when the laconic is saved. Thus, when a backslash character is saved in the laconic, it is escaped when the entry is edited again. The process keeps repeating, escaping an exponentially increasing number of backslashes, until they are removed. I don't quite understand why this happens, myself.