Regexp - Escape Character

About

The escape character in a regular expression is the backslash.

It's needed when the regular expression want to design a meta characters in a regular expression.

It

• takes away any special meaning that the meta characters may have.
• applies both inside and outside character classes.

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Example

For example, if you want to match:

• the backslash itself, you write \\
• a * character, you write \*

otherwise, they would be have be interpreted as meta-character

Php: Single and double quoted PHP strings have special meaning of backslash. Thus if \ has to be matched with a regular expression \\, then “\\\\” or '\\\\' must be used in PHP code.