A regex-pattern uses many special characters to describe a pattern. Ex., . means “any character”, \\+ is “one or more” etc.

To use these characters, as a .,\\+ etc., in a pattern, you need to escape them to remove their special meaning. This is done by using the escape character which is a backslash \\\\ in regex. Example: To search for \\+, you would use the pattern \\+.

It can be hard to remember all special characters in regex, so to escape every special character in a string you want to search for, you could use the [RegEx]::Escape("input") method.

> [regex]::Escape("(foo)")
\\(foo\\)

> [regex]::Escape("1+1.2=2.2")
1\\+1\\.2=2\\.2