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# How can I have a colon as part of a room name?

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asked Jun 30 in Authoring by One-armed Badger

I want to use a colon in the name of a room (e.g. Briefing room: Midday) but every time I7 sees the colon it assumes I want to provide a definition.

In Inform 6 there were certain characters substituted for others (such as the tilde for quotation marks to allow speech to be represented inside of a piece of text), so I'm guessing the answer lies along those lines.

I've looked in the General Index but can't find anything under 'colon', 'punctuation' or 'substitute'. Punctuation has a sub entry "apostrophe, meaning quotation mark" which again makes me think there's some other character I can use instead.

- inform7
- colons
- punctuation

## 1 Answer

0 votes
answered Jun 30 by bg (692 points)
edited Jun 30 by bg

The printed name property can be used for this:

    Briefing Room is a room. The printed name of Briefing Room is "Briefing Room: Midday".

This can also be changed during play, as in "§8.5. Change of properties with values" in the manual.

AFAIK, using an apostrophe for quotation marks will only work within a string. The printed name property allows you to treat the room name like a string, e.g. including conditions and text substitutions within the name.

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