Special characters

When you are creating text items or instruction pages, some characters require special treatment. For example, imagine that you are creating a text stimulus that contains quotes. Quotes play a special role in Inquisit syntax of marking the beginning and the end of a stimulus item, so Inquisit needs away to distinguish quotes that are part of the item from those that indicate the beginning and end. If a quote is preceded by the escape character '~', this tells Inquisit that the quote is not a delimiter, but should be included in the item.

For example, the following text stimulus:

<text mytext>
/ items = ("The man said ~"hello~".")
/ size = (300, 200)
</text>

appears on the screen as

The main said "hello".

The following text stimulus, however, will result in a warning that there is extra text at the end of the item definition because the quotes are treated as markers of the beginning and end of the item:

<text mytext>
/ items = ("The man said "hello".")
/ size = (300, 200)
</text>

Other special characters that are expressed using the escape character '~' include tabs, newlines, and carriage returns. The list of special characters is below.