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Special characters to escape

Special characters must be escaped only if they have special meaning in the context in which they are being used. For example, the asterisk (*) is a special character only in the "Include" and "Exclude" attributes of an item definition, or in a call to CreateItem. In all other cases, the asterisk is treated as a literal asterisk. While you do not need to escape asterisks everywhere in project files, doing so does no harm.

Use the notation %<xx> in place of the special character, where <xx> represents the hexadecimal value of the ASCII character. For example, to use an asterisk (*) as a literal character, use the value %2A.

The full list of special characters to escape follows:

Character ASCII encoding Description
% %25 Percent sign, used to reference metadata.
$ %24 Dollar sign, used to reference properties.
@ %40 At sign, used to reference item lists.
( %28 Open parenthesis, used in lists.
) %29 Close parenthesis, used in lists.
; %3B Semicolon, a list separator.
? %3F Question mark, a wildcard character when describing a file spec in an item's Include/Exclude section.
* %2A Asterisk, a wildcard character when describing a file spec in an item's Include/Exclude section.

Note

In some scenarios, you may need to escape double quote (") characters, such as when using within an Exec task.

See also