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### 7.2 Specifying Word Entities

The variable `edt-word-entities` is used to emulate EDT’s ‘`SET ENTITY WORD`’ command. It contains a list of characters to be treated as words in themselves. If the user does not define `edt-word-entities` in his/her `.emacs` file, then it is set up with the EDT default containing only `TAB`.

The characters are stored in the list by their numerical values, not as strings. Emacs supports several ways to specify the numerical value of a character. One method is to use the question mark: ‘`?A`’ means the numerical value for ‘`A`’, ‘`?/`’ means the numerical value for ‘`/`’, and so on. Several unprintable characters have special representations:

    ?\b  specifies  BS, C-h
    ?\t  specifies  TAB, C-i
    ?\n  specifies  LFD, C-j
    ?\v  specifies  VTAB, C-k
    ?\f  specifies  FF, C-l
    ?\r  specifies  CR, C-m
    ?\e  specifies  ESC, C-[
    ?\\  specifies  \

Here are some examples:

    (setq edt-word-entities '(?\t ?- ?/)) ; specifies TAB, - , and /
    (setq edt-word-entities '(?\t)        ; specifies TAB, the default

You can also specify characters by their decimal ascii values:

    (setq edt-word-entities '(9 45 47))   ; specifies TAB, - , and /