What characters need to be escaped in .NET Regex?

Question

In a .NET Regex pattern, what special characters need to be escaped in order to be used literally?

Answer 1

See the MSDN documentation here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/az24scfc.aspx#character_escapes

The problem with a complete list is that it depends on context. For example . must be escaped, unless it is enclosed in brackets, as in [.]. ] technically does not need to be escaped, unless it is preceded by [. - has no special meaning, unless it's inside of brackets, as in [A-Z]. = has no special meaning unless it is preceded by ? as in (?=).