Tested this change with both gawk and nawk and it worked fine. If
the extra escape character is present and gawk is used, you'll get
warnings from gawk telling you it's ignoring the escape sequence
and just treating it as the character to begin with.
#
# allow escaping of significant syntax characters
#
- gsub("[\\\][{]","{")
- gsub("\\\:",":")
- gsub("\\\;",";")
- gsub("\\\=","=")
- gsub("[\\\][}]","}")
+ gsub("[\\][{]","{")
+ gsub("\\:",":")
+ gsub("\\;",";")
+ gsub("\\=","=")
+ gsub("[\\][}]","}")
#
# Having insured that interesting chars are surrounded by blanks