S-Tags in auto-responders: Benefits of using Bracket vs XML syntax

Justin Wenzl

When it comes to auto-responders for our donation and registration forms in LO, my organization has always used bracket syntax for the HTML versions and XML syntax for the plain text versions. The people who originally made these decisions have since departed, and I am curious if anyone knows a potential reasoning behind them.

Due to syntax challenges, I would like to use bracket notation in the plain text version of an auto-responder. Is there a potential drawback to doing so?

Bonus question: If anyone wants to show me how to convert the following to XML, I would be interested to learn. Assuming bracket notation works, though, this would be purely educational.

The snippet below uses the replaceall operator of the 130 S-Tag to convert the recurring frequency label to a form that fits the sentence structure. In attempting to recreate it in XML, I am running into issues with opening and closing tags and escaping quotation marks.

By making this gift every [[E130: "[[S120:dc:recurringFrequencyLabel]]"
"Monthly" "month" replaceall
"Quarterly" "quarter" replaceall
"Annual" "year" replaceall]] you are providing…

Thank you in advance for any insights!