How do you escape something like "[[text]]" in sendChat? tilde and /direct don't work

I'm trying to send "[[text]]" via sendChat, and not have it processed at all. I've tried variations of "/direct" and "`" from looking here: <a href="https://wiki.roll20.net/API:Chat#sendChat.28speakingAs.2C_input_.5B.2Ccallback_.5B.2C_options.5D.5D_.29_.5BAsynchronous.5D" rel="nofollow">https://wiki.roll20.net/API:Chat#sendChat.28speakingAs.2C_input_.5B.2Ccallback_.5B.2C_options.5D.5D_.29_.5BAsynchronous.5D</a> <a href="https://wiki.roll20.net/Text_Chat#Escape_Text_.28.60.29" rel="nofollow">https://wiki.roll20.net/Text_Chat#Escape_Text_.28.60.29</a> I can't seem to find anything that works, and the sendChat page has no mention of escape characters that I can find. These are some of the variations I've tried: sendChat("Export", "`[[text]]"); sendChat("Export", "/direct [[text]]"); sendChat("Export", "`/direct [[text]]"); sendChat("Export", "/direct `[[text]]"); HTML escapes don't seem to work either. "&amp;amp;" works properly and outputs "&amp;", but " &amp;#5b;" doesn't work properly and is just output as-is. sendChat("Export", "&amp;#5b;&amp;#5b;text&amp;#5d;&amp;#5d;"); Edit: Nevermind, I'm dumb. I forgot HTML escapes aren't hex by default. :) This works fine: sendChat("Export", "&amp;#x5b;&amp;#x5b;text&amp;#x5d;&amp;#x5d;");

5b is the Unicode hex reference for opening bracket, you need the html entity for it which is either one of &amp;#91: &nbsp;or &amp;#lbrack; .

Thanks! I just realized that now too. That's what I get for not verifying my HTML escape in a separate .html file and assuming everything is hex by default. :)

Oh, just to double check since I'm so new to roll20, is this the "preferred" way to do this kind of escaping btw? I thought "/direct" would be what I want originally, so I'm just wondering if I'm missing a better way to handle this than just doing "[" -&gt; "&amp;#x5b" replacement.

HTML replacement is the way to go to get around the order of operations and syntax-identification for Roll20 parsing. Meaning... as an example... if you have nested attributes (AttrA contains a reference to AttrB which contains a reference to AttrC), those will be expanded up to 99 times. Any of them could put some syntax into the command line that would be detectable (like your inline-roll syntax). In order to preserve the text until *after* Roll20 parsers finish their order of ops, you use the HTML replacements. HTML is unescaped at the point of presentation or, for roll queries, once for each level of query prompt... I believe. Someone can correct me if I'm wrong. Double-escaping: [&nbsp; &nbsp; =&gt;&nbsp; &nbsp; &amp;lbrack;&nbsp; &nbsp; =&gt; &amp;amp;lbrack;

Awesome, thanks for the additional info!

I endorse everything said so far, but I have to ask: why are you using [[ ]]? Are there any other characters you can use so you don't need to use those?

It's because I'm trying to export some of the raw HTML for things like GM notes and our campaign journal, so I needed a way to fully escape an arbitrary string I have no control over.

This is the function I use for escaping for Roll20: const HE = (() =&gt; { const esRE = (s) =&gt; s.replace(/(\\|\/|\[|\]|\(|\)|\{|\}|\?|\+|\*|\||\.|\^|\$)/g,'\\$1'); const e = (s) =&gt; `&amp;${s};`; const entities = { '&lt;' : e('lt'), '&gt;' : e('gt'), "'" : e('#39'), '@' : e('#64'), '{' : e('#123'), '|' : e('#124'), '}' : e('#125'), '[' : e('#91'), ']' : e('#93'), '"' : e('quot') }; const re = new RegExp(`(${Object.keys(entities).map(esRE).join('|')})`,'g'); return (s) =&gt; s.replace(re, (c) =&gt; (entities[c] || c) ); })();

Thanks! Look like I'm missing "@" and "|" from the list I have. I was just escaping stuff as it came in and caused the script to error out.

It's another IIFE that returns a function (see other one of your threads). It's important to separate the &amp; and the rest of entity in your script code as the API Sandbox will eat them if you get things in the 1-click.

What do you mean by the "1-click" btw?

Scripts in the Roll20 Official Github can ask to be included in the 1-click Script Library, and can then be installed from the dropdown:

Oh cool, had no idea that was a thing. (I'm still very noob). I'll read up on that!