I cannot view or enter control characters

drdrgraham wrote on Mon Nov 13 09:15:07 CET 2006:

 I am new to EPIC -- I've not found the way to either view or enter control
characters using the 
Perl Editor plug-in.

  I have a lot of old code which uses the control character variables, such
as $^V ($PERL_VERSION).
When I use EPIC with the code, "$^V" shows up as "$".

The line executes just fine, and I can cut and paste the "$", and still
have it pick up the invisble ^V, but 
I have to edit the files in another editor to do see what is going on.

Am I missing something or is there really no way to work with the control
character variables?

In new code, I'm using "use English", but that does not really address the
issue that the 
editor disallows legal Perl syntax.

jploski wrote on Mon Nov 13 19:00:46 CET 2006:

You did not mention your version of EPIC. The current version 0.5.21 (and
0.4.21) works all fine here - same syntax highlighting for $^V as for $PERL_VERSION.
Also, I don't recall ever having trouble with the built-in variables disappearing.
Maybe you should experiment with fonts (Window/Preferences/General/Appearance/Colors
and Fonts/Basic/Text Font) or syntax highlighting preferences (Window/Preferences/Perl
EPIC/Editor/Syntax/Variable).

When you enter $^V you type three keystrokes, $, ^ and V, right?

drdrgraham wrote on Tue Nov 14 17:02:27 CET 2006:

Jan -- Thanks for the quick reply, 

I have to admit I'm feeling foolish...  
I was not typing $^V ( dollar, caret, V ) --

In my old code, (for which I use emacs, I've type in the control characters

(emacs quote next char, which is by default ctrl-Q, then the char ,in the
example I 
cited ctrl-V) the variable is in the text as a single control-char.  Not
a caret - char
doublet.  

After reading your post, I re-read the perlvar page, carefully.  There it
says,

       ..... Perl has  a special syntax for the single-control-character
names: It understands
       "^X" (caret "X") to mean the control-"X" character.  For example,
the
       notation $^W (dollar-sign caret "W") is the scalar variable whose
name
       is the single character control-"W".  This is better than typing
a lit-
       eral control-"W" into your program.

So -- there is a an easy work-around to the problem -- I just replace all
the literal control-chars
with the caret-char combination.  

However -- I still believe it a bug -- although minor, that the Perl Eclipse
Editor shows a bare $ sign
when editing code with literal control char variables.  I will look into
fixing this when I get a chance.

Again -- Thanks for pointing me to an easy solution.

Dan 

jploski wrote on Tue Nov 14 18:34:51 CET 2006:

Yes, it's a bug, now entered here:

https://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1596451&group_id=75859&atid=545274