I am quite guilty of not doing this

Make up an explicit weekly reading list with no particular plan in mind

An escape character is an awful lot of fun in programming. It seem to have the ability to allow multiple dimensions where only one dimension is allowed. A disguise, a ruse, a ploy, almost always clever getting out of tight squeezes.

An encode function

Here is a function that I am very fond of

escapedString = 
encode(oldString, 
   escapeChar, 
   oldCharacter, 
   newCharacter);

The function will replace every old character with the new character with a preceding escape character. The function will also escape the escape character itself.