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

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