Backslashes: You’re supposed to be familiar with this character. It looks like a forward slash that gave up. A backslash have two uses: 1) escaping sequences, and 2) file paths. And then there’s regex patterns where it appears too. But backslashes are used for things like file paths, escape sequences, and regex patterns. Until now… […]

You can simply copy your text and feed it to the calculator (above) which will do math for you. There’s no need to count them by hand. By scanning each character, it keep tabs on openers and closers. Unmatched positions is reported, along with depth of nesting, plus density. On the surface, this seems simple: […]

The forward slash lurks in your text. You probably don’t notice it, that’s its job. It divides files and folders within URLs, quietly doing its work so we can use the Web as we do today. In dates, you treat 04/18/2025 as simply a convenient shorthand for marking time. Perhaps you’ll sneak one into a […]

The one that probably comes to mind for most people is the pipe character. That is the one beside backslash key on keyboards. However, that is not what it used to do. It was originaly used in Unix shells to string together commands. Now, it’s primarily used as a column delimiter in data exports and […]