Item10242: Exclamation mark does not work the same as the HTML nop when parenthesis are involved.

One of the ways to escape a macro is to prepend it with a bang (!).

Normally this works fine, e.g.

• %SYSTEMWEB%

However, if I want to put the same text in parenthesis, the bang fails to escape the macro, e.g.

   * (!%SYSTEMWEB%)

• (%SYSTEMWEB%)

Since nop tags can be used to accomplish the same, marking this low priority.

-- WryFi - 11 Jan 2011

raising to normal - as it shows that the renderer/parser is being inconsistent.

we should convert all the synonyms for NOP to one form right at the beginning, and thus deal with them identically.

-- SvenDowideit - 09 Mar 2011

The ! Normally escapes wikiwords. I did not we had a spec that made it escape the expansion of a macro. Where is that documented and is it correct?

-- KennethLavrsen - 09 Mar 2011

This function has been in the code since original import.

commit cd9c3f9d90142efd713de5addc2c35afd83aac96
Author: CrawfordCurrie <CrawfordCurrie@0b4bb1d4-4e5a-0410-9cc4-b2b747904278>
Date:   Wed Nov 19 13:40:25 2008 +0000

    Item175: First bulk rename pass. Note: not quite ready yet
    
    git-svn-id: http://svn.foswiki.org/trunk@809 0b4bb1d4-4e5a-0410-9cc4-b2b747904278

diff --git a/core/lib/Foswiki.pm b/core/lib/Foswiki.pm
--- /dev/null
+++ b/core/lib/Foswiki.pm
@@ -0,0 +2789,2 @@
+    # Escape ' !%VARIABLE%'
+    $$text =~ s/(?<=\s)!%($regex{tagNameRegex})/&#37;$1/g;

So if anything we need to document it, not remove it. The regex could use some tweaking as well to be a bit more generous in what it escapes. Any non-space character in front of the ! disables the escaping. Another option is to deprecate use of ! to escape macros, and document that %<nop%gt;MACRO% is the recommended solution.

• %SYSTEMWEB%.!%TOPIC% becomes: System.%TOPIC%
• =!%SYSTEMWEB%= becomes: !System

-- GeorgeClark - 04 Jan 2015

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