Pattern
Set Pattern Old | New
(Initially: New)
Qedit uses “@”, “#”, “?”, and “~” to define a pattern to be matched. The original pattern-match logic in Qedit did not allow you to look for a pattern that contained a literal “@”. The current pattern-match logic allows “&” as an “escape” character. This means that you can look for any reserved pattern-match character by putting & in front of it. For example,
/list "@LISTF B&@,2@" (pat)
Note that the “escape” character does not match the ASCII escape character, whose value is decimal 27 or octal 33. In this case “escape” means the same as the “transparency” character in VPLUS/3000 pattern-matching: the next character following the escape is to be treated as a literal instead of a pattern-match metacharacter.
Two other characters have been reserved for future use: ^ and !.
To reset Qedit to the old pattern-match logic, use Set Pattern Old (the default is Set Pattern New).