A minor issue was reported where the notifications menu displays raw backslash escapes in titles, unlike the rendered title when viewing the topic itself. LeoDavidson provided an example where a title with a UNC path in Windows (\\server\share) is not escaped properly in notifications.
sam initially thought the issue wasn’t worth fixing, but later agreed it was a bug after LeoDavidson pointed out cases where backslashes need to be escaped in titles. sam investigated the code and suggested removing the “magic” handling for backslashes in titles.
codinghorror questioned the need for the special handling and suggested removing it. sam agreed, noting that it would make it harder to specify quotes in titles, but would make the escaping rules more consistent.
The issue was fixed in a commit by sam, removing the special handling for backslashes in titles. However, sam noted that there is still an edge case with quotes not being “fancy” in notifications, which should be addressed in the future.
All look correct to me except for the notification menu.
(We also surely have proof that time travel will never exist, as nobody has gone back in time and stopped MS-DOS / Windows from using a common escape character all over file paths and leaking into conversations about file paths. )
FWIW, there are some cases where you do need to escape baskslashes in titles.
One example is a title about UNC paths in Windows:
Problem going to \\server\share
becomes:
Problem going to \server\share
unless you double up the first pair of backslashes:
Problem going to \\\\server\share
Our forum is about a file manager, so this example isn’t entirely contrived. That said, it is still rare for it to matter, and the problem is still small and cosmetic, so it may still not be worth fixing. We can certainly live with it.
If the escaping is kept in titles, one thing that is a little odd is that the rules aren’t the same as in message bodies.
For example, C:\* requires you double the backslash in a message body, but not in a title.
(I guess it makes sense in a way: Bold and italic markdown don’t apply to titles, * has no special meaning at the end of words in titles, so it doesn’t need escaping. OTOH, it’s easier to remember either one set of rules, or that escaping isn’t needed at all for titles. Still, it’s minor in the grand scheme of things so whatever you choose to do, if anything, is fine. Always a risk that changing something breaks something else!)
That code only apply to title prettify, we lifted it from the original implementation. Happy to remove it if you are comfortable with there being no easy way to specify " in a title (as opposed to the pretiffied version)
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