Brackets
Guidelines for using angle brackets, curly braces, and square brackets in formatting, including examples and best practices.
There are 3 kinds of brackets: angle brackets, curly braces, and square brackets.
Angle brackets ( < and > )
Angle brackets are used to format placeholder values:
-
Use the
<varname>semantic tag when writing placeholder variables to render the formatting automatically. If you're not writing with semantic tags, wrap the variables you want a user to enter in angle brackets.
See the Formatting reference for more formatting guidance.
The following table shows an example of placeholder variables rendered in angle brackets:
Enter your user-specified domain in this format: https://user-specified domain.splunkcloud.com. |
|
Don't use the right-pointing angle bracket ( > ) to indicate navigation through a series of menu item selections. Use the <menucascade> semantic tag. Otherwise, if you are hard-code formatting a navigational path for a user, spell out the sentence using a word like "then". See the Formatting reference.
The following table shows examples of acceptable menu path navigation with and without using a semantic tag, as well as an example of what to avoid:
|
|
In order for an action to qualify as a step in a menu path, the action must be accessible within that menu. If completing a step in the path takes the user to a new page or menu where they complete another action, describe that action in a new task step instead of combining it in the same step.
|
|
Curly braces ( { and } )
Use curly braces only when they are part of a code sample or other string literal.Square brackets ( [ and ] )
Use square brackets around a .conf file stanza name or within code. See the following examples:
- Edit the [splunktcp] stanza.
- Specify a subsearch that starts with this search command:
tag=dns query [search tag=malware].