I am writing a fairly complex mail merge document which has some conditional expressions. In the THEN and ELSE areas, I am trying to include a double quote. I have figured out that if I put in a backslash before the double quote that the IF is properly executed, but the backslash remains. Is there a way to correct that?

For example,

{IF {MERGEFIELD field_name} = "Yes" "My \"Yes\" answer." "My \"No\" answer."}

Will display either: My \"Yes\" answer. or My \"No\" answer. and I can't get the backslashes to go away.

I don't know about the language you're coding in, but I think that if you put the whole thing in single quotes instead of double quotes, and got rid of the backslashes, it would work. Like:

{IF {MERGEFIELD field_name} = 'Yes' 'My "Yes" answer.' 'My "No" answer.'}

I'm not sure, but it it functions properly in JavaScript and PHP...

- Steve

I was going to say the same thing, but then I thought to myself, "Jeremy has like 3 times more programming experience than me, I think he probably thought of that."

What language ARE you using dude?

Hah! that's exactly what I thought as well, wayfarer. But oh well, I thought I'd post it anyway.

I'll second wayfarer's query: What language ARE you using dude?

Like they said, I don't know what language this is. But maybe there is a way you could use ascii values and then encode it before output. That might be a bad way but its the best I can think of right now.

Just thought of something else. Convert the string to a character array and output each character. Even as I'm think of it it sounds like a completely wrong an terrible way of doing this, but its the best I got

Someone should stop me before I start writing assembly code to break down the string and output characters that arn't slashes.

Thanks for the tips! And, the reminder about the alternate string syntax. You're right, I should have thought of that. Just tested, though, and it didn't work. The "language" is MS Word 2007's Mail Merge IF conditional.

I've tested doubling the quotes, the escape trick, switching between "smart" quotes and regular quotes, and -- now -- switching the quote style (which gave problems with apostrophes too).

What I've ultimately ended up using as a solution is having a macro executed on mail merge to search and replace \" with ". Not ideal, but it does work.

One would think, however, that there'd be a correct way to escape the quotes for display.