Add Unique Coloring for Escape Character Backslash

Product Suggestions
1

An item which is not super obvious when using expressions is that the “\” character is actually an escape character. This is standard with strings, but for users who aren’t familiar with that convention it is not intuitive.

This mainly shows up with Regular expressions, since all backslashes in the expression have to be doubled for the expression to run correctly. For example, see below:

image

It would be nice to have escape backslashes given a different color compared to normal text, to make it clear that this is not a normal character.

EDIT: I did not catch this originally but the \ character is ALSO an escape character in the community comments editor, and was missing before

REGEX Issue to extract data from a string
Expression REGEX_(MATCH|REPLACE) documentation
2

Thanks David for the feedback- let me connect with the team to see if there’s any context for the original color decision and circle back!

3

Hi, is there any update on this? I’m finding it hard to prove out my REGEX commands on TULIP vs the RegExr website which is extremely helpful and colour codes everything but does not require any further ''.

4

Hi @Tom_LB thank you for following up here. We don’t have any immediate improvements planned here, but know the Expression Editor in general is an area of opportunity.

We’re keeping an eye on upvotes to prioritize this against other items, and will also forward the feedback to our team to see if anything fast is possible.

5

I wasted few hours today because of this “we need to input backslash twice behavior”.

Please implement the proposed improvement.

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6

Thank you for the upvote. I reflagged this thread internally.

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