dannyman.toldme.com

WordPress: How to type a Backslash

WordPress rocks. It is blog software that drives much of this web site. WordPress rocks, it does, except for a few things it sucks at, like printing backslashes.

They’re taken care of the BR-in-PRE stuff, but I still have trouble with backslashes. They don’t get displayed unless you type two backslashes, but there seems to be another preprocessor that sucks out backslashes when you edit the post, and typing \\ into the web just seems so wrong.

But you can use HTML entity references. These are HTML escape codes for character literals. Here are a few potentially handy ones:

< &lt;     Greater Than
> &gt;     Less Than
& &amp;    AMPersand

' &#39;    single quote
" &#34;    double quote
\ &#92;    backslash
; &#59;    semicolon

The #number entities correspond to decimal values of ASCII, which you can check on a Unix box with man ascii. Or, here you go:

               33  !    34  "    35  #    36  $    37  %    38  &    39  '
      40  (    41  )    42  *    43  +    44  ,    45  -    46  .    47  /
      48  0    49  1    50  2    51  3    52  4    53  5    54  6    55  7
      56  8    57  9    58  :    59  ;    60  <    61  =    62  >    63  ?
      64  @    65  A    66  B    67  C    68  D    69  E    70  F    71  G
      72  H    73  I    74  J    75  K    76  L    77  M    78  N    79  O
      80  P    81  Q    82  R    83  S    84  T    85  U    86  V    87  W
      88  X    89  Y    90  Z    91  [    92  ]    93  ]    94  ^    95  _
      96  `    97  a    98  b    99  c   100  d   101  e   102  f   103  g
     104  h   105  i   106  j   107  k   108  l   109  m   110  n   111  o
     112  p   113  q   114  r   115  s   116  t   117  u   118  v   119  w
     120  x   121  y   122  z   123  {   124  |   125  }   126  ~

I usually make it a habit to type < and > as &lt; and &gt;. Don’t forget the semicolon! Some web browsers will interpolate broken HTML like &amp as an ampersand, just to make up for sloppy web pages, but that is just going to cause you trouble down the road. Always type the ampersand and the semicolon.