Re: How to really escape a double quote?

[David Kastrup]

Kevin Rodgers <kevin.d.rodgers@gmail.com> writes:

> On 2/24/11 5:00 PM, David Kastrup wrote:
> ...
>> ^ loses its special meaning if it is not the first character of the
>> string.  So move your escaped double-quote one position to the right.
>
> I didn't know that!  Here's the reference from (elisp)Regexp Special:
>
>      For historical compatibility reasons, `^' can be used only at the
>      beginning of the regular expression, or after `\(', `\(?:' or
>      `\|'.

You are looking in a non-obvious place for information which you then
somehow map to the required one, making it appear like using Emacs is a
black art.  It would suffice to consult the DOC string of the function
in question:

skip-chars-forward is a built-in function in `C source code'.

(skip-chars-forward STRING &optional LIM)

Move point forward, stopping before a char not in STRING, or at pos LIM.
STRING is like the inside of a `[...]' in a regular expression
except that `]' is never special and `\' quotes `^', `-' or `\'
 (but not at the end of a range; quoting is never needed there).
Thus, with arg "a-zA-Z", this skips letters stopping before first nonletter.
With arg "^a-zA-Z", skips nonletters stopping before first letter.
Char classes, e.g. `[:alpha:]', are supported.

Returns the distance traveled, either zero or positive.

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-- 
David Kastrup