But maybe '%' has some merit, although it can occur in unquoted filenames.
I think we should go with '%' or maybe '!'.
What about ';' - are there any regex engines that attach meaning to either ; or \;?
No, but having "s;a;b;g;" be different from "s;a;b;;g;" would not be nice...
I see several s||| in the manual, along with the explicit recommendation for 's|||', followed by 's,,,', rather than 's///' [1]. I also see several instances of 's,,,' that we should probably adjust, given this thread. Meanwhile, I also found things like [2], where we made a sweep through the source to replace 's,,,' with 's|||'.
That's fine because we are careful not to use unportable regex. There are many occurrences of \| in the wild.
Paolo
