[Harlowe] Closing parenthesis without opening one wrongly interpreted as end of macro

Menti

Consider this:

(set: $a to (datamap:
1, "test",
2, ")"
))

I want to use the closing parenthesis symbol as a piece of text, that's why it's between double quotes.

The problem is that Harlowe wrongly understands that parenthesis as pairing with "(datamap:" and closing the macro. The closing parenthesis always gets paired to the nearest opening parenthesis, even if quotes should prevent that.

Putting the parenthesis between inverted commas, "`)`", didn't help me either.

Just in advance of replies: no, I can't use another character, only ")", and yes, it has to be unpaired, no previous "(".

Is there any way I can do this? Is this a legitimate bug? Thanks!

prof_yaffle

Use a backslash to escape the bracket

(set: $a to (datamap:
1, "test",
2, "\)"
))

Menti

Thanks, that did it!

Is this documented? The manual tells about tildes to escape markup, and the backslash only for line breaks.

greyelf

@Menti

The backslash character is used to escape special characters within a Javascript String value, although a close parenthesis is not normally considered a special character. The backslash is also used to escape special characters in a regular expression and the close parenthesis is a special character in them.

The fact that you needed to escape the close parenthesis leads me to believe that you have found a bug in the regular expression used for either the (datamap:) or (set:) macro.
I suggest you create a new issue on the Harlowe project website so that it can be fixed.

L

Thanks for noting this - I'll have a fix in the next version, no report needed.

Menti

I must say that I used (datamap: ) as an example, but I observed the same problem using other values within a (set:) macro.

I just checked that this most simple example doesn't work:

(set: $a to ")")

Thanks everyone.