Escape Character

Qedit 5.7 for HP-UX

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Escape Character

Other characters used in a regular expression might also have special meanings. The most important one is probably the escape character. In Qedit, the backslash is the escape character. A metacharacter, however, loses its special meaning if preceded by a backslash. In the example,

abc[123]

square brackets indicate a character class. This regexp would match "abc1," "abc2" or "abc3." If we escape the square brackets as in

abc\[123\]

the square brackets are then used as literals. This means they are now part of the string. The only matching value is then "abc[123]."

If you want to search for a backslash, simply enter two of them in a row (\\). The only exception to this is the start-of-line metacharacter. Because it (^) is also a valid escaped sequence (see next section), there is no way to tell Qedit to search for the caret as a literal. You should use an expression with the corresponding hexadecimal value.

x05e


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