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

• How to: Escape special characters in MSBuild
• MSBuild reference