Metacharacter
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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, the ; (semicolon) character stops the previous statement and starts a new one.
- 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.