There are various codes and special characters you can put in your Avalon input line, or after the = when defining ALIAS content.

@hello

Putting the @ sign before a word means use whatever content is in the variable that word refers to, either one of your own variables ( HELP VARS) or one of the Avalon preset or autoset ( HELP AUTOSET, HELP PRESET).

%###

Putting the % sign before a number means pause at that point for the specified number of centiseconds (hundredths of a second) before moving onto the subsequent commands, e..g. smile%100 grin means smile, then a second later grin.

!#

The ! character means use the target and you include a number 1 through 9 to denote which target to use (see HELP TARGETS).

&myalias

When you put the & character before a word, that word is taken to refer to an alias from your ALIAS LIST and this will define what goes into your input, e..g. if you had an alias called myalias and had it set to throttle gandalf, whenever you put &myalias it would mean include throttle gandalf instead.

:###

The single colon character means include the contents of an Avalon macro. These are numbered, explained in HELP MACROS but simply put: if you put :12 in your input or alias definition, it would put whatever your macro 12 was set to whenever the alias or input was parsed.

You can put an = at the start of your input line to ensure it is evaluated through the above parsing, expanding out variables, macros, aliases et al.

Clients can sometimes interfere with special characters. Make sure your client is not doing this:

- if zMud or cMud, switch off "client parsing".