appearing in web.config file

Question

I'm seeing a lot of weird escaped characters typically in my web.config appearing. Has anyone ever seen them? what causes them? and is it safe to leave in the web.config?

Answer 1

I suspect that some editor inserts those when the file has a non-matching EOL character combination. Windows uses CRLF, and if only a single CR or LF is found (UNIX and Macintosh use those AFAIR) this might be what the editor created to maintain a high fidelity of the text data. But they should be interpreted as whitespace and therefore not hurt you.

See also the Wikipedia article on newline.