78

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
  • 2,143

3 Answers3

97

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).

István Zachar
  • 1,089
sudhansu63
  • 1,106
54

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.

By wrapping parts of your message in {code} tags you can apply !! to those parts, i.e. Here is the {code}monospaced{code} word in a proportional message!

EDIT 2020: updated the link to the official FAQ, and added {code} tag description.

Oleksii Taran
  • 661
5

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 &#x7e;test&#x7e; you will see ~test~ (and not test)

Alberto M
  • 263