Literals and Escaping Special Characters

Most characters match themselves, but twelve characters have special regex meanings and must be escaped with a backslash \ when you want to match them literally:

. * + ? ^ $ { } [ ] ( ) \ |

For example: - . matches any character, but \. matches a literal period - $ marks end of string, but \$ matches a literal dollar sign - ( starts a group, but \( matches a literal parenthesis

Always escape these characters when you want an exact literal match.