# Backslashes with placeholders
**URL:** https://community.mp3tag.de/t/backslashes-with-placeholders/40846
**Category:** Site Feedback
**Created:** [February 17, 2018, 10:10am UTC](https://community.mp3tag.de/t/backslashes-with-placeholders/40846 "2018-02-17T10:10:48Z")
**Posts on this page:** 18
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@poster](https://community.mp3tag.de/u/poster)
#### Post date: [February 17, 2018, 10:10am UTC](https://community.mp3tag.de/t/backslashes-with-placeholders/40846/1 "2018-02-17T10:10:48Z")
I think that most of my problems with the new forum software occur because I am used to other software and getting too old to change my habits. 😉
But there some things that are really disturbing. I often write and then see that the forum software just eats up some signs that I wrote.
So I noticed that a written backslash in a format string with placeholders just vanishes.
I found out that I can avoid that by using "Preformated Text".
`D:\Music\%artist%\%track% - %title%`
without using preformated text would look like
D:\Music%artist%%track% - %title%
Are there other ways of avoiding the disappearance of these backslashes?
Anyway:
I think this is a real problem for the forum because you already can see such strings without backslashes, where it looks like the backslashes should be there. The members just did not see that after saving or in preview their written backslashes disappeared.
And I noticed - which is even a bigger problem - that the backslashes in a lot of transferred threads from the former forum-software seem to be missing too.
---
### Author:  [@tablerocker](https://community.mp3tag.de/u/tablerocker)
#### Post date: [February 18, 2018, 2:24pm UTC](https://community.mp3tag.de/t/backslashes-with-placeholders/40846/2 "2018-02-18T14:24:13Z")
> [@poster](#):
>
> Are there other ways of avoiding the disappearance of these backslashes?
Yes, you can use double backslash to make one backslash appear:
D:\Music\%artist%\%track% - %title%
what I actually wrote here:
`D:\\Music\\%artist%\\%track% - %title%`
Backslash is now considered not as normal but as a control character and therefore must be "escaped".
---
### Author:  [@poster](https://community.mp3tag.de/u/poster)
#### Post date: [February 18, 2018, 4:04pm UTC](https://community.mp3tag.de/t/backslashes-with-placeholders/40846/3 "2018-02-18T16:04:31Z")
> [@tablerocker](#):
>
> Backslash is now considered not as normal but as a control character and therefore must be “escaped”.
The backslash only vanishes if it is in combination with %.
"D:\Music\Rock" makes no problem.
This feature already causes a lot of confusion, because it is not intuitive for most users and I doubt that it will ever get.
> [@\_DIRECTORY formatting issue with non alphanumeric characters](https://community.mp3tag.de/t/directory-formatting-issue-with-non-alphanumeric-characters/40754):
>
> I have an action to place songs in the %artist%%album% folder, and it works ok for alphanumeric characters (lower and upper case and numbers) but not special characters like $ let alone Unicode. Here's my action: Format value: Field =\_DIRECTORY Format string = E:\Media\Music\%artist%\%album% I've tried it both with and without a trailing slash at the end of the format string, and it doesn't affect it at all. Try it yourself, Put A$ap Rocky or $uicideBoy$ in the artist field then apply the ac…
And as I wrote there is a big problem with threads of the past, which were not transcribed to be correct with the new forum-software, for example:
> [@How to move complete folders?](https://community.mp3tag.de/t/how-to-move-complete-folders/11572):
>
> Hello, I was wondering if it's possible to move complete folders using mp3tag? I'd like to move all albums of a specific genre into their appropriate folder (rock albums to the "rock" folder etc), and since the mp3s are properly tagged I can easily sort the tracks by genre inside mp3tag. But then I can only move the mp3s.. I could do it manually for each folder but that would take me too much time, so I thought maybe there's an easier way? hope you can help!
---
### Author:  [@Florian](https://community.mp3tag.de/u/Florian)
#### Post date: [February 18, 2018, 5:29pm UTC](https://community.mp3tag.de/t/backslashes-with-placeholders/40846/4 "2018-02-18T17:29:53Z")
> [@poster](#):
>
> The backslash only vanishes if it is in combination with %.
This also came as a surprise to me and I think "normal" markdown doesn't have this specific behavior. I don't think that the markdown engine used by Discourse can be adapted to make an exception for this special case. I'm still researching how to best fix the old posts to properly escape those character combinations.
I think in the long run, we'll get used to this new behavior, use code ticks to mark format strings (this looks better anyway) and hopefully spot missing backslashes in posts of new members here.
---
### Author:  [@tablerocker](https://community.mp3tag.de/u/tablerocker)
#### Post date: [February 18, 2018, 5:36pm UTC](https://community.mp3tag.de/t/backslashes-with-placeholders/40846/5 "2018-02-18T17:36:29Z")
> [@poster](#):
>
> The backslash only vanishes if it is in combination with %.
It will also vanish at the end of a line because you can use it as visible marker (in the source code) for a new line instead of two spaces. It's a special character now.
```plaintext
line one\
line two
```
> [@poster](#):
>
> threads of the past, which were not transcribed to be correct with the new forum-software
I think this could be solved by replacing all single backslashes with double ones, except they are in `[code]` tags. But such replacements are always quite risky.
---
### Author:  [@Florian](https://community.mp3tag.de/u/Florian)
#### Post date: [February 19, 2018, 5:32pm UTC](https://community.mp3tag.de/t/backslashes-with-placeholders/40846/6 "2018-02-19T17:32:17Z")
> [@Florian](#):
>
> I’m still researching how to best fix the old posts to properly escape those character combinations.
FYI, I've fixed the imported posts.
---
### Author:  [@poster](https://community.mp3tag.de/u/poster)
#### Post date: [February 20, 2018, 2:27pm UTC](https://community.mp3tag.de/t/backslashes-with-placeholders/40846/7 "2018-02-20T14:27:32Z")
@Florian
Thank you. That will avoid a lot of confusion with older threads.
Do you see a chance to fix the problem with quotation marks in older imported threads too?
[https://community.mp3tag.de/t/feature-request/16010/2?u=poster](https://community.mp3tag.de/t/feature-request/16010/2?u=poster)
---
### Author:  [@Florian](https://community.mp3tag.de/u/Florian)
#### Post date: [February 20, 2018, 4:04pm UTC](https://community.mp3tag.de/t/backslashes-with-placeholders/40846/8 "2018-02-20T16:04:11Z")
> [@poster](#):
>
> Do you see a chance to fix the problem with quotation marks in older imported threads too?
I've just finished conversion of the quotation marks and changed the forums software, so that it doesn't convert them automagically anymore.
Thanks for the motivation!
---
### Author:  [@Florian](https://community.mp3tag.de/u/Florian)
#### Post date: [February 24, 2018, 10:53am UTC](https://community.mp3tag.de/t/backslashes-with-placeholders/40846/9 "2018-02-24T10:53:23Z")
Just FYI, I've just finished another conversion where certain code blocks where not displayed as such.
---
### Author:  [@poster](https://community.mp3tag.de/u/poster)
#### Post date: [March 10, 2018, 10:27am UTC](https://community.mp3tag.de/t/backslashes-with-placeholders/40846/10 "2018-03-10T10:27:54Z")
I noticed another problem in threads of the former forum software, which have not been undergoing a conversion:
Threads that refer to create multi-value Fields with the double-backslash`"\\"`.
Example:
> [@Double slash trick](https://community.mp3tag.de/t/double-slash-trick/11014):
>
> Hello! I often use "\\" as separator character in some tags, but instead of one tag i get several because of splitting. Is there any way to disable this double slash trick? (I know about "Merge dublicate tags" action, but may be there is better way?)
---
### Author:  [@Florian](https://community.mp3tag.de/u/Florian)
#### Post date: [March 10, 2018, 6:05pm UTC](https://community.mp3tag.de/t/backslashes-with-placeholders/40846/11 "2018-03-10T18:05:56Z")
> [@poster](#):
>
> Threads that refer to create multi-value Fields with the double-backslash"\".
I'm starting to fear your posts in this topic 😨
This one is actually very tricky as there are already a plentitude of posts where the single backslash has been replaced by a double backslash. It's now hard to impossible to determine which of the 3147 posts use `\\` to denote multi-value fields. I'll have to think about this.
---
### Author:  [@ohrenkino](https://community.mp3tag.de/u/ohrenkino)
#### Post date: [March 10, 2018, 6:11pm UTC](https://community.mp3tag.de/t/backslashes-with-placeholders/40846/12 "2018-03-10T18:11:00Z")
Couldn't this be determined by the date:
all posts prior to the switch probably mean `\\` when while the later ones used it as a workaround?!
---
### Author:  [@Florian](https://community.mp3tag.de/u/Florian)
#### Post date: [March 10, 2018, 7:44pm UTC](https://community.mp3tag.de/t/backslashes-with-placeholders/40846/13 "2018-03-10T19:44:21Z")
> [@ohrenkino](#):
>
> Couldn't this be determined by the date
If I hadn't replaced many single backslashes to double backslashes due to the other issues raised in this thread before — yes. Now the ones that were double backslashes already before became undistinguishable from the converted ones. 🤪
---
### Author:  [@poster](https://community.mp3tag.de/u/poster)
#### Post date: [March 10, 2018, 10:07pm UTC](https://community.mp3tag.de/t/backslashes-with-placeholders/40846/14 "2018-03-10T22:07:39Z")
> [@Florian](#):
>
> Now the ones that were double backslashes already before became undistinguishable from the converted ones.
But did you not only change those to double which were together with % or at the end of a line?
---
### Author:  [@Florian](https://community.mp3tag.de/u/Florian)
#### Post date: [March 10, 2018, 11:21pm UTC](https://community.mp3tag.de/t/backslashes-with-placeholders/40846/15 "2018-03-10T23:21:31Z")
Yes, and I've changed some other occurrences too.
Over the past hours, I've written a small script that detected the occurrences of the multi-value fields separator and converted it to the new format. It should display fine now.
Thanks for pointing!
---
### Author:  [@incifinci](https://community.mp3tag.de/u/incifinci)
#### Post date: [October 26, 2019, 2:05am UTC](https://community.mp3tag.de/t/backslashes-with-placeholders/40846/16 "2019-10-26T02:05:02Z")
My notice is similar, so i decided not to start a new topic.
I want to write: D:\Art\Ferrante And Teicher\Midnight cowboy\05. Ferrante And Teicher - Popi.flac
I want the part Ferrante And Teicher\Midnight cowboy\ to be in bold, but could not achieve it because of backslashes. It seems simply:
D:\Art\*\*Ferrante And Teicher\Midnight cowboy\*\*05. Ferrante And Teicher - Popi.flac
or with double backslashes:
D:\Art\*\*Ferrante And Teicher\Midnight cowboy\*\*05. Ferrante And Teicher - Popi.flac
---
### Author:  [@Crissov](https://community.mp3tag.de/u/Crissov)
#### Post date: [November 1, 2019, 1:37pm UTC](https://community.mp3tag.de/t/backslashes-with-placeholders/40846/17 "2019-11-01T13:37:31Z")
This is an edge case that Commonmark with its flanking behavior is not (and cannot be) really prepared for. There are workarounds, however.
`D:\Art\` **`Ferrante And Teicher\Midnight cowboy\`** `05. Ferrante And Teicher - Popi.flac`
D:\Art\ **Ferrante And Teicher\Midnight cowboy\** 05. Ferrante And Teicher - Popi.flac
```auto
`D:\Art\` **`Ferrante And Teicher\Midnight cowboy\`** `05. Ferrante And Teicher - Popi.flac`
D:\Art\\ **Ferrante And Teicher\Midnight cowboy\\** 05. Ferrante And Teicher - Popi.flac
```
---
### Author:  [@incifinci](https://community.mp3tag.de/u/incifinci)
#### Post date: [November 1, 2019, 4:22pm UTC](https://community.mp3tag.de/t/backslashes-with-placeholders/40846/18 "2019-11-01T16:22:16Z")
> [@Crissov](#):
>
> `D:\Art\` **`Ferrante And Teicher\Midnight cowboy\`** `05. Ferrante And Teicher - Popi.flac`
@Crissov, thank you for the tip.
My opinion: i really like the new engine and look of the site, but this one thing works better with Bulletin Board Codes: **[b] ... [/ b]**. It can not be confused by the system.