Escaping

Let's assume someone wrote an eno document describing which clothing to wear at different temperatures:

30 degrees celsius: Swimming trunks
10 degrees celsius: Warm pullover and windjacket
`-10 degrees celsius`: A very warm coat

You'll notice that something is different in the third line: The -10 degrees celsius has been put between two backticks ( ` ).

Here's why:
-10 degrees celsius starts with a -, and in eno every line starting with a - is interpreted as an item as we learned before, therefore we need some way to say that we really mean "minus 10 degrees celsius" and not "10 degrees celsius" as an item.

Here are some more examples of escaping in eno:

`https://example.org/`: An example website

Every field in eno follows the pattern key: value, but in this case our key https://example.org/ contains a : already, therefore we need to escape it.

`` `hypothetical` ``: The word "hypothetical" inside backticks

You might have wondered how an escape can be escaped, this is achieved by using two backticks around the key that is itself wrapped in (single) backticks, and leaving spaces so it does not look like three backticks. (these spaces on the outside are not included in the key though)

Escaping can also be required for an embed, namely if a line inside the embed looks exactly like the opening/ending line of the embed itself. It can be escaped by adding any number of additional dashes to the -- operator in both the opening and ending line:

--- My Field
-- My Field
--- My Field

Lastly note that escaping only is supported/required for the key of a field, attribute, flag and for embeds - simply because anything else does not ever need to be escaped! The keys of sections and all values in eno always occur as the last (or only) token in a line, thereby their content can be used verbatim and unambiguously, no matter what they contain.