# How to return escaped characters from MathLink?

I'd like to return Greek symbols through MathLink from a C function. However, returning the usual escape sequence (such as \[Alpha]) does not seem to work. Here's a minimal example .tm file (myalpha.tm) which creates a function that should simply return \[Alpha] :

void myAlpha P(( ));

:Begin:
:Function:          myAlpha
:Pattern:           myAlpha[ ]
:Arguments:         { }
:ArgumentTypes:     { }
:ReturnType:        Manual
:End:

void myAlpha() { MLPutSymbol( stdlink, "\\[Alpha]" ); }
int main(int argc, char *argv[]) { return MLMain(argc, argv); }

To compile it (on OSX) I use :

And to run it I execute this little script :

myAlpha[];
Print[%]

Inside a Mathematica notebook this produces some binary symbol, and if I run it with MathKernel from the commandline then I get :

$IterationLimit::itlim: Iteration limit of 4096 exceeded. Hold[Out[$Line - 1]]

My guess is that I haven't escaped everything correctly in the C string, but I'm not sure what the right escape sequence is. Since \ is the escape character in C I have escaped that, so the C-string reads "\\[Alpha]" and I've tried a variety of other options but to no avail.

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