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A metacharacter is a character that has a special meaning to a computer program, such as a shell interpreter or a regular expression (regex) engine.. In POSIX extended regular expressions, there are 14 metacharacters that must be escaped — preceded by a backslash (\) — in order to drop their special meaning and be treated literally inside an expression: opening and closing square brackets ...
Generally, an escape character is not a particular case of (device) control characters, nor vice versa.If we define control characters as non-graphic, or as having a special meaning for an output device (e.g. printer or text terminal) then any escape character for this device is a control one.
A numeric character reference refers to a character by its Universal Character Set/Unicode code point, and a character entity reference refers to a character by a predefined name. A numeric character reference uses the format &#nnnn; or &#xhhhh; where nnnn is the code point in decimal form, and hhhh is the code point in hexadecimal form.
A Unicode character is assigned a unique Name (na). [1] The name is composed of uppercase letters A–Z, digits 0–9, hyphen-minus and space.Some sequences are excluded: names beginning with a space or hyphen, names ending with a space or hyphen, repeated spaces or hyphens, and space after hyphen are not allowed.
Extreme examples occur when these are combined – Uniform Naming Convention paths begin with \\, and thus an escaped regular expression matching a UNC name begins with 8 backslashes, "\\\\\", due to needing to escape the string and the regular expression. Using raw strings reduces this to 4 (escaping in the regular expression), as in C# @"\\\\".
Regular expressions are used in search engines, in search and replace dialogs of word processors and text editors, in text processing utilities such as sed and AWK, and in lexical analysis. Regular expressions are supported in many programming languages. Library implementations are often called an "engine", [4] [5] and many of these are ...
In HTML and XML, a numeric character reference refers to a character by its Universal Character Set/Unicode code point, and uses the format: &#xhhhh;. or &#nnnn; where the x must be lowercase in XML documents, hhhh is the code point in hexadecimal form, and nnnn is the code point in decimal form.
The "escape" character (ESC, code 27), for example, was intended originally to allow sending of other control characters as literals instead of invoking their meaning, an "escape sequence". This is the same meaning of "escape" encountered in URL encodings, C language strings, and other systems where certain characters have a reserved meaning.