escaping

In regular expressions, escaping refers to canceling the special function of certain characters. It is typically necessary when searching for punctuation.

For example, a dot (or full stop) ‘.’ in a regular expression is used to find any character. To find the actual dot or full stop, the dot has to be escaped to cancel its special function. A backslash is used to escape a dot.

\.

This is especially important in CQL because regular expressions are part of CQL. To find the word however with commas before and after, this CQL should be used. The commas must be escaped.

[word="\,"] [word="however"] [word="\,"]