I strongly oppose to using the escape character (tilde) for this purpose, as I've just written in Creole1.0Poll.
Space
This requires that a nowiki block have no leading spaces to start
Irrelevant, but nice for symmetry.
and no leading spaces to end. So, the triple curly braces must start the line. Therefore, if you want to display triple curly braces within a nowiki block, you would put a space in front of them, since only triple curly braces at the beginning of a line end a nowiki block.
Yes, this was adopted a long time ago.
This solution also
Why "also" ?
makes it impossible to display closing triple curly braces inline.
Wrong, it's possible with greedy nowiki, as it was adopted a long time ago too.
Tilde
Another method is to display the triple curly braces if a tilde is put in front of them like }}}.
Then you must escape all tildes, which is painful since tildes are quite common in many programming languages. And if you use the escape character only to escape braces and tildes, it's close to the normal escape character, but not quite; an overly complicated difference.
This is the way JSPWiki works and therefore is Not New.
How does it solve this problem?
-- YvesPiguet, 2007-Jun-21
Sorry if my tone was overly dramatic, but this rule:
To include closing braces where they might be considered as nowiki or preformatted end tag, there is one additional rule that works for both inline and block: three closing curly brackets preceded by a tilde are escaped (although otherwise tildes do not escape in nowiki)
does not allow for the sequence tilde+three closing braces at the beginning of a line.
Making tests in the JSPWiki sandbox
, the tilde works like spaces in the current Creole:
one tilde is removed when followed by three closing braces (but it's removed anywhere in block or inline nowiki). So it's a completely different kind of escape character than what we have at other places. BTW, JSPWiki and Creole would be
incompatible anyway, in the way leading spaces are used.
-- YvesPiguet, 2007-Jun-21