Metacharacter

Metacharacter: A metacharacter is a character that has a special meaning (instead of a literal meaning) to a computer program, such as a shell interpreter or a regular expression engine.

Examples

In some Unix shells and Windows PowerShell, the ; (semicolon) character is a statement separator.

In many regular expression engines, the . (dot) character matches any character, not just a dot.

In XML and HTML, the & (ampersand) character introduces an HTML entity.

In many programming languages, strings are delimited using quotes. In some cases, escape characters (and other methods) are used to avoid delimiter collision. Example : "He said : \"Hello\"".

See also

Delimiter

Markup language

Categories:
Formal languages
Pattern matching
Programming language topics
Programming language topic stubs

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metacharacter — noun A character used to signify something other than its literal form, such as the asterisk when used as a wildcard … Wiktionary
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Perl Compatible Regular Expressions — Original author(s) Philip Hazel Stable release 8.20 / 2011 10 21; 25 days ago (2011 10 21) Written in C … Wikipedia

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Metacharacter

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Metacharacter

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