History of 2022-11-14 Doubling backslashes

2022-11-14
20:43 UTC Revision 1 . . . . mborkToday’s post is not meant to be very useful to most people, but it serves as a demonstration of a point (well, that, and a bit of advertisement;-)). However strange it may sound, a few days ago I have a very atypical need. I needed to move some LaTeX code to a JSON file. This meant that all the backslashes had to be doubled, of course – LaTeX code is full of them, and they need to be escaped in JSON. Obviously, query-replace​’ing backslashes with double backslashes is easy, and query-replace only operates on the region when it is active, but I wanted to make sure I didn’t replace them twice by accidentally marking too much. So – partly as an exercise, I guess – I decided to write a command to replace every backslash in the region by two backslashes, but only if it was a single one.