Replacetext conundrum

[Martin Baxter]

Rob Beynon wrote:
> Dear All
> 
> Why does (in the message box even, but also in scripts)
> 
> put the replacetext("dah at dah","@",".") give "dah.dah"
> 
> but
> 
> put the replacetext("dah.dah",".","@") give "@ @ @ @ @ @ @"
> 
> this is surely a bug?
> 
> 

I think not a bug, unless you mean why are there spaces between the ats 
in the result? I would expect the ats but not the spaces. Is that really 
what you get?

The dot as second parameter has special meaning in regular expressions - 
it means "any character" essentially, so it will cause all characters in 
param 1 get replaced with param 3. Try this:

put the replacetext("dah.dah","\.","@")

The backslash tells RR to treat the dot as a literal.

Martin Baxter