how do i escape a slash character in a WPF binding

Question

I'm just learning WPF, and I gragged a table from a datasource onto a window which generated XAML for each column.

Some of those columns had names that caused the following:

<DataGridTextColumn x:Name="_Rev_UnitColumn" Binding="{Binding Path=Rev/Unit}" Header="Rev/Unit" Width="SizeToHeader" />

This causes the column to come up blank (like me).

Answer 1

On MSDN there is an article on property paths which has a section on escape characters:

Inside indexers ([ ]), the caret character (^) escapes the next character.

You must escape (using XML entities) certain characters that are special to the XML language definition. Use & to escape the character "&". Use > to escape the end tag ">".

You must escape (using backslash \) characters that are special to the WPF XAML parser behavior for processing a markup extension.

• Backslash (\) is the escape character itself.
• The equal sign (=) separates property name from property value.
• Comma (,) separates properties.
• The right curly brace (}) is the end of a markup extension.

The slash is not listed here so i do not know if the backslash escape would work, but you can try.

(How exactly do you have a property name like that? It seems to be illegal both in XML and C#)

Answer 2

I (kind of randomly) tried:

<DataGridTextColumn x:Name="_Rev_UnitColumn" Binding="{Binding Path=[Rev/Unit]}" Header="Rev/Unit" Width="SizeToHeader" />

And the result was everything worked as I expected it to. Looking at it again, I guess H.B.'s MSDN quote tells me this. When I read that (originally on MSDN before I even posted this question, then again here) I just didn't understand what "Inside indexers --comma-- the caret character (^) escapes the next character" meant.