Escape Metacharacters

In regex, certain characters have special meanings. To match these characters literally, you need to "escape" them by prefixing them with a backslash \. Here are some common metacharacters that need to be escaped:

• .: Matches any character except newline.
• *: Matches 0 or more repetitions of the preceding element.
• +: Matches 1 or more repetitions of the preceding element.
• ?: Matches 0 or 1 repetition of the preceding element.
• ^: Matches the start of a string.
• $: Matches the end of a string.
• |: Acts as an OR operator.
• (): Groups patterns.
• []: Creates a character class.
• {}: Specifies repetitions.

import re

text = "The price is $5.99"
pattern = r"\$5\.99"
matches = re.findall(pattern, text)

print(matches)  # Output: ['$5.99']

In the above example, the pattern \$5\.99 matches the literal string "$5.99". The $ and . characters are escaped to match them literally.