Escape character

An escape character is a character that causes one or more characters that follow it to be interpreted differently. This forms an escape sequence, which is often used to represent a character that has an alternative meaning when printed literally, such as the quote character in a string literal. Escape sequences can have other usages too, especially in regular expressions.

  • In JavaScript regexes, string literals, and identifiers, we can use the backslash (\) to escape characters like \', \", \u0026, etc.
  • In CSS identifiers, we can use the backslash (\) to escape characters like \\, \n, \26, etc. See escape characters for more information.
  • In HTML text content and attribute values, we can use character references like <, <, or <.
  • In URLs, we can use the percent sign (%) to escape characters like %20, %3C, %3E, etc.

See also