[Info-vax] Suggestion: Enhance DCL to support proper escape quoting.

[Phillip Helbig undress to reply]

In article <ss9ujo$14m3$1 at gioia.aioe.org>, hb <end.of at inter.net> writes:

> On 1/19/22 9:12 PM, Phillip Helbig (undress to reply) wrote:
> > In article <ss9lil$764$2 at dont-email.me>, Simon Clubley
> > <clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP> writes:
> ....
> >> In bash, escaping a special character is simple - you just add a
> >> backslash in front of the special character, so ' would become \'
> >> instead. I think that's vastly better and cleaner than how it is
> >> done in DCL.
> > 
> > Interestingly, I was searching a .tex file.  \<anything> are TeX control
> > codes.  :-|
> > 
> On VMS:
> $ ty helloworld.tex
> \documentclass[12pt]{article}
> \begin{document}
> Hello world!
> $Hello world!$ %math mode
> \end{document}
> $ grep "\\end" helloworld.tex
> \end{document}
> $
> Same command works in bash, although one would prefer
> $ grep '\\end' helloworld.tex

Consider the TeX command \".  OK, to search for it I need to escape the 
backslash, thus search for \\".  But then " is part of what I'm 
searching for, so using that as a delimiter is also tricky.  The DCL 
solution has the advantage that it is pretty obvious what it does.

Note that \\ is also a valid TeX command (which means "start a new line 
here".  So to search for that I would search for \\\\?