Mastering Windows PowerShell Scripting - Second Edition

Literal characters

The best place to begin is with the simplest of expressions: expressions that contain no special characters. These expressions contain what are known as literal characters. A literal character is anything except [\^$.|?*+(). Special characters must be escaped using \ to avoid errors, for example:

'9*8'-match '\*'   # * is reserved 
'1+5' -match '\+'   # + is reserved 

Curly braces ({}) are considered literal in many contexts.

Except when...:Curly braces become reserved characters if they enclose either a number, two numbers separated by a comma, or one number followed by a comma. In the following two examples, { and } are literal characters: '{string}' -match '{' '{string}' -match '{string}' In the preceding example, the curly ...