On 9. Aug 2011, at 11:01 , Robert B. Waltz wrote:

> I'll tell you why it's a mess: ANY character preceded by \ should be treated as a literal, simply for consistency. I'm pretty sure this does not work, because of the odd results I've been getting. Unfortunately, I haven't yet identified the exact command causing my problems, but it appears that, somehow, a \t is being treated as a literal t!

With all due respect what you are saying here is inconsistent. You want \[char] to be treated as a literal and then you complain when "\t" is treated as a literal "t" ;-)

Of course "\" is the escape character which means that characters following it are usually treated in a non-literal way. Only special characters should (must) be treated literally after a backslash. NWP does indeed do this correctly, to my knowledge. And "\t" should of course be a tab, which it is. (And enclosing it in double quotes, should just cause interpolation, i.e., turn it into an actual tab, so this shouldn't cause a problem.)

Your problem with the "\t" sounds familiar, but only because it happened to me. When I figured it out, I was doing something wrong at the time. But I can't remember what the problem was.

> 
> I may be wrong. As I say, I haven't found the line that is doing it.
> 
> Is there a way to step through a macro by any chance? Like a debugger?

Run Selection as Macro still works.

For Find/Replace statements that is pretty much your best option.
The macro language does have some Debug commands, but they are mainly useful for checking variables.


Philip Spaelti
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