How to input special character in cmd?

Question

I have written a c program that retrieves arguments from the command line under Windows. One of the arguments is a regular expression. So I need to retrieve special characte

Answer 1

You can put the arguments in quotes:

myprogram.exe "(this is some text, with special characters.)"

Though I wouldn't assume that parentheses cause problems unless you are using blocks for conditional statements or loops in a batch file. The usual array of characters that are treated specially by the shell and need quoting or escaping are:

& | > < ^

If you use those in your regular expression, then you need quotes, or escape those characters:

myprogram "(.*)|[a-f]+"
myprogram (.*)^|[a-f]+

(^ is the escape character which causes the following character to be not interpreted by the shell but instead used literally)