Escape special characters

A regex-pattern uses many special characters to describe a pattern. Ex., . means “any character”, \+ is “one or more” etc.

To use these characters, as a .,\+ etc., in a pattern, you need to escape them to remove their special meaning. This is done by using the escape character which is a backslash \\ in regex. Example: To search for \+, you would use the pattern \+.

It can be hard to remember all special characters in regex, so to escape every special character in a string you want to search for, you could use the [RegEx]::Escape("input") method.

> [regex]::Escape("(foo)")
\(foo\)

> [regex]::Escape("1+1.2=2.2")
1\+1\.2=2\.2