GEMS11 — Escape characters

Escape characters: To make parsing quite a bit easier (enabling the use of string tokenizer tools found in most modern programming languages) we suggest changing the current escape character implementation with a mechanism similar to the one used for HTML / XML. This would mean identifying all special characters ('|', ',', ';' . . .) and creating character sequences for them ('&p', '&c', . . .). Doing this would simplify parsing code significantly. The initial message could then be easily split using the '|' as the token. Array members could easily be split using a ',' etc...

Adopt a simple escape character sequence. There are numerous standard escape sequences available, but the most common do not provide for the specific four characters needed in the GEMS ASCII PSM: | , & ;
To keep the ASCII PSM simple the following table is to be used:
Character Escape Sequence
& &a

Other PSMs might need a different escape sequence and will define this table differently.