RE: [xml-dev] XML: why there is no escape (was Re: [xml-dev] What to escape when serializing XML)

• From: "Michael Kay" <mike@...>
• To: "'Rick Jelliffe'" <rjelliffe@...>,<xml-dev@...>
• Date: Wed, 3 Jan 2007 21:56:22 -0000

> To escape a character means to do something (typically, to 
> prefix it with \ in C-family languages) to allow the 
> character to be used literally but without its normal parser 
> treatment.  So \ before a newline in a shell script is an 
> escaped character. 

Kernighan and Ritchie don't use "escape" as a verb, but they do refer to
constructs such as "\n" and "\b" as "escape sequences". So it seems fairly
natural that people should use the verb "escape [a character]" to mean
"represent [a character] by means of an escape sequence". Representing tab
by "\t" doesn't seem very different from representing tab by "	", so
it's natural that the same verb should be used for that too.

Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/