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  

Escape Character