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Tokens - Escape Special Characters

When invoking a token, there are some special characters that determine the syntax. These characters are: [, ] and |.

Usage and examples​

To clearly illustrate the purpose of the special characters, here is a simple example:

[User:UserName|I'm user {0}] - this token will display "I’m user <MyUsername>"

The problem appears when you want to actually display a character that is considered as "special" by the token engine. For example, the token "[User:UserName|I'm user {0}, but I'd prefer to be called user[pro|b|lem]]" will result in an error, as the token engine will be confused by the syntax. It will be unable to determine the delimitation of the token and format.

Solution​

To overcome this limitation, use HTML encoded entities; these are pieces of text ("strings") that begin with an ampersand ("&") and end with a semicolon (";"). Entities are frequently used to display reserved characters (which would otherwise be interpreted as HTML code), and invisible characters (like non-breaking spaces). The three entities we need for the example above are:

[ ⇒ &#91;
] ⇒ &#93;
| ⇒ &#124;

Please see here for a list of HTML entities.

We can now can rewrite our token example: [User:UserName|I'm user {0}, but I'd prefer to be called user&#91;pro&#124;b&#124;lem&#93;].

This will now correctly display: "I’m user <MyUsername>, but I’d prefer to be called user[pro|b|lem]".

Nested tokens​

Let's take the following token: [User:UserName|I'm user {0} and I'm currently on [Tab:TabName] page]

It will dispaly: "I’m user MyUsername and I’m currently on Home page". We now have a nested token [Tab:TabName] that Plant an App will replace with a value. If we wanted the text [Tab:TabName] to be displayed on the screen, we would have escaped the special characters by using their HTML codes described above.