Re: I continue to get error ob-ref: unescaped character literals

[Stephen Berman]

On Mon, 23 Nov 2020 04:37:07 +0100 Christopher Dimech <dimech@gmx.com> wrote:

> I am continually getting the following error.  What is it?
>
> Loading ‘ob-ref’: unescaped character literals `?(', `?)' detected, `?\(',
> `?\)' expected!

It's a warning from the byte compiler that it found `?(' and `?)' in
elisp code, which should be written as `?\(' and `?\)'.  See (info
"(elisp) Basic Char Syntax"):

  The usual read syntax for alphanumeric characters is a question mark
  followed by the character; thus, ‘?A’ for the character ‘A’, ‘?B’ for
  the character ‘B’, and ‘?a’ for the character ‘a’.
  [...]
     You can use the same syntax for punctuation characters.  However, if
  the punctuation character has a special syntactic meaning in Lisp, you
  must quote it with a ‘\’.  For example, ‘?\(’ is the way to write the
  open-paren character. [...]

Steve Berman