Escape characters?

Suggestion Box
1

Is it possible to use escape chars such as new line and tabulation? For example:

Currently Concatenate("a","\n","b") returns

a\nb

Expected would be

a
b
2

A possible alternative would be to use Unicode characters instead. For that, you would do something like this:

Concatenate("a",Character(10),"b")

In Unicode, the tenth character is newline, so that should output correctly :+1:

If you need it to be a “\n” style newline, I’m not sure. FWIW, it doesn’t appear to be possible to use Regex style escape characters, even within a Regex. For example, I had thought you might be able to do this using the following formula:

RegexReplace(Concatenate("a","\n","b"),"(\\n)","\n")

But it doesn’t work. Perhaps someone else knows why/if, but hopefully the other solution is valid :blush:

1 Like
3

Unfortunately, Character(10) returns a simple space. I tried many different versions of unicode new line too (Newline - Wikipedia), both hex and decimal. Some of them output a box, others nothing at all.

4

@Dalmo_Mendonca @Murray_Adcock

It never worked before, but I just tried it and it worked for me.

5

@Ander

Ok now that you said it worked I just went back and tested again… and nothing. BUT…

Then I tested it inside a cell and it worked! Character(9) also works for tabulation.

1 Like
6

@Dalmo_Mendonca

Yeah, I was only testing in a cell. I think they must have tweaked this Character() formula or something.

The hack I was using was slow to work with and didn’t copy/paste, so I’m glad Character(10) now gets the job done!

As @Murray_Adcock said: “:+1:” !

1 Like
7

Sorry, should have specified that I was working in a cell, glad you got it working :blush:

8

Thanks Murray. It’s only half working, but does the job with a single cell simple table.

Maybe the admins could move this to the suggestion box to implement parsing special chars in regular text?

2 Likes
9

Thanks @Dalmo_Mendonca for the suggestion. Moved it to the suggestion box and added it to our request tracker.

1 Like
10

Out of interest, am I correct in saying that you can’t use special chars on the right hand side of a RegEx in Coda? That might provide a separate solution if it did work.

11

This method worked well for me on Mac.

  1. In a cell, I pasted a paragraph without any new lines. I then, within that cell, cursored to the end of the first sentence, just to the right of the period. I then tapped ctrl+return.

  2. Although it looks like there is a newline with no space between, I highlight from the right of the period of the first sentence until I reached to left of the capital letter of the following sentence.

  3. Copy this invisible space. It contains whatever “character” is recognized in Coda as “New Line”. I pasted this ghost character in between the quotes of the Find("", Note) formula. It worked perfectly returning the index of the first new line.

12

This seems to be working now. Thanks for the silent updates. :heart_eyes: