Finding incorrect usages of "\" with Notepad++
"\n" is used in game description files to represent a line break. e.g. In historic_events.txt: "This is the first line.\nThis is on another line."
If you follow the "\" with any other character besides "n", including spaces, then the entire description is broken and the game shows no text at all where that description is supposed to be. It is very easy to accidentally leave out the "n", or accidentally delete it, or to do something like "this \ that" (instead of "this / that"). You won't know that your game has a problem until somebody happens to stumble across it in-game; the game does not report these errors. It happened to me once and it took a long time to figure out what the cause of this bizarre behaviour was.
Fortunately it is easy to find them with some text searching. This is how to do it in Notepad++...
1) Use the Find function (CTRL+F)
2) Choose the Regular expression Search Mode option
3) For the find text use: \\[^n]
It can also be used with Notepad++'s Find In Files function which will search all of your files at once.
That's all. Simple and quick to do, every now and then, just to make sure that all is okay.
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Related topic: Finding/fixing EOL & Encoding problems in Notepad++. It has some screenshots of the options I'm talking about above.
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