Mastering Windows PowerShell Scripting - Third Edition

Literal characters

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

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

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

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, ...