WoW UI Escape Sequences

This skill documents the UI escape sequences available in World of Warcraft addon development. Many UI elements that display text on screen support special sequences starting with the | (pipe) character. These sequences enable inline coloring, texture/atlas rendering, grammar inflection, word-wrapping hints, and more — all within ordinary Lua strings.

Source of truth: https://warcraft.wiki.gg/wiki/UI_escape_sequences Current as of: Patch 12.0.0 (Retail only) Scope: All | escape sequences recognized by the WoW UI text renderer.

When to Use This Skill

Use this skill when you need to:

• Embed color codes in chat messages, tooltips, or FontStrings
• Use named global colors (|cn) or item-quality colors (|cnIQ)
• Insert inline textures or atlas icons into text
• Apply localized grammar rules (Korean, French, Russian, plurals, articles)
• Understand word-wrap hints (|W) or Kstring obfuscation (|K)
• Use helper functions like WrapTextInColorCode(), CreateTextureMarkup(), CreateSimpleTextureMarkup(), or CreateAtlasMarkup()

Relationship to Other Skills