Board Thread:Support Requests - Getting Technical/@comment-131168-20140114160305

Short background: I've got a template with a parameter that thus far has either been given an image in form, or another template  that aids in making a tabber of multiple images. I'd like to make it possible to just insert whatever.jpg as the simplest case for a single image, without creating a parameter of a different name or breaking the way it currently works.

To do this I'd want to run a test on the parameter input, like searching for a character in the string, or checking what the first character is. However, while checking for [ brackets works fine, { brackets not so much. It wants to first replace everything within [ with the content of Template:Brackets, just like it would anywhere else.

Is there a way to run a test on the actual characters before they start doing their work, or some other way of accomplishing what I'm hoping? My best bright idea yet was to try to force nowiki tags around the input, but that didn't seem to do any good. 