how to escape square brackets?

Ha! thought someone would have this issue too :) for me it was in the custom_links module.

I used percent url encoding to escape it

[ => %5B
] => %5D

so ?edit[field_related_match][0][nid]=123 => edit[field_related_match][0]%5Bnid%5D=123 did the trick. Does anyone think there should be a more elegant solution? maybe [\nid\] would work?

Special characters like that always need to be encoded. It's kind of a common knowledge kinda thing. There's not a good place to document this here.

So thankful for this solution. I was about to go crazy trying to craft a prepopulate link in a views "Rewrite the output of this field" which is not only token-enabled, but argument-enabled -- which thwarted my attempts to escape the "n" "i" "d" characters... bravo.

In the help text of a field, this doesn't work.

I was able to escape square brackets in the help field using html special character codes.

left bracket: [
right bracket: ]