Escape Skype Messages to Use Special Character Combinations

In a technical environment it's more than common to copy/paste configuration files, URLs, code samples and such in order to inform the other chat participant about something. In that case all kinds of combination of characters may be used, even ones Skype recognises as emoticons.

Example with a URL:

http://your.host/app/search?pattern=mine:*

The :* causes Skype to show a kissing emoticon, which obviously is completely pointless here.

How do I escape the : or * or whatever to avoid that? Note that I don't want to turn off emoticons or delete the emoticon-folder as that would only make me see the clear text, but any other chat partner still sees the emoticons. Everybody should see the plain text exactly as I intended no matter how he/she configured Skype.

sjngm

Posted 2014-09-15T10:14:09.963

Reputation: 1 873

In the typical Microsoft fashion, the only way to escape the formatting is through some proprietary methods. The standard way of escaping using backslashes \ simply would not work. As a programmer, I'm quite used to using backslash to escape special characters (including the backslash). Alas, no joy in Skype... – ADTC – 2016-04-12T03:19:17.730

Answers

You can use the new* Skype feature for doing this:

!! Preformatted text: Use two exclamation marks and a whitespace (<Space> or linebreak)
as the first 3 characters of your message and paste your snippet after it.
Example: This is (not) a kissing smiley! :*

You can also use these commands to turn this on or off:

/wikimarkup off                 // Text will not be converted.
/wikimarkup on                  // Text will be converted.

Turning conversion off (e.g. with !! ) disables the following formatting features, among others:

* bold *
~ ~~strikethrough~~ ~
_ italic _

and it also displays URL without formatting them to clickable hyperlinks or displaying the site's thumbnail as an image.

_{* It's available in the latest version on Windows 8 & Windows 7 (Skype version 6.22.81.105 onwards).}

sudhAnsu63

Posted 2014-09-15T10:14:09.963

Reputation: 1 016

1Cool. I have just updated and it only found version 6.22.0.107 for my Win7. Anyway, it works there, too :) – sjngm – 2014-12-05T07:14:30.957

1The !! prefix yields a monospaced font. – Aaron Thoma – 2015-06-02T10:56:44.533

10Please suggest @@ in the answer because !! results in a monospace font. We don't want our message to look like code just because we didn't want it to be auto-formatted. – ADTC – 2016-04-12T02:07:45.590

Skype formatting seems to have changed radically in the new Skype included as part of Windows 10 (I'm on Skype 12.7.597.0), in which these methods no longer seem to work. I have asked a new question at Do not insert emoticons into sent messages in Skype version 12

– Silverfish – 2017-11-06T16:31:04.390

For me !! gives monospace font but does not disable *bold*. This is using the linux version (skype 8.13.*) – AnnanFay – 2018-01-31T14:37:45.390

@Silverfish: I can confirm this no longer works in Windows 10. I've posted an answer to that question, which is to trip up Skype's parser by inserting a very narrow whitespace character (Unicode 8205).

– Amos M. Carpenter – 2018-08-09T02:30:09.757

@AmosM.Carpenter - in Windows 10, as of 8.44.0.40, !! works - *if on a line by itself* - I prepared the desired multi-line text ahead of time in notepad, complete with the exta !! line in front of it, pasted it as one operation. – ToolmakerSteve – 2019-05-06T20:21:23.247

As stated here, you can use either @@ (note the space after @) at the beginning of the message to override formatting, or !! to send message in monospace font.

Oleksii Taran

Posted 2014-09-15T10:14:09.963

Reputation: 581

7The @@ did not work for me, but the !! did. – Dan – 2015-05-27T12:44:35.557

The @@ has started to work for me somewhere between June and now. (I.e.: It hasn't worked for me in June either, but now it does.) ( @Dan ) – Aaron Thoma – 2015-12-17T15:09:10.037

4@@ suppresses the interpretation of formatting (* bold *, ~ <s>strikethrough</s> ~, _ italic _), but emoticons (e.g. :)) will still be interpreted (including (!) and (*)). – Aaron Thoma – 2015-12-17T16:00:21.493

(… and including (lol).) – Aaron Thoma – 2016-01-14T13:21:38.357

1May 2018: @@ did not work for me (Skype web) – rgoliveira – 2018-05-07T20:16:06.967

Since the @@ does not always work (at least it doesn't for me in Skype Web, as of Jan. 2019), you can suppress the formatting and keep the normal proportional font by inserting the special characters as HTML escapes.

E.g. using ~test~ you will see ~test~ (and not ~~test~~)

Alberto M

Posted 2014-09-15T10:14:09.963

Reputation: 195

4What did they do?! ROFLMAO OMG facepalm oh-no sighs cries – sjngm – 2019-01-22T10:28:14.053