Editing Escape character (section)

{{short description |Character used to quote special-purpose characters, e.g. '\'}}
{{for|escaping markup in Wikipedia edits|WP:NOWIKI|selfref=y}}
{{Distinguish|control character|escape sequence|Escape key}}
{{Refimprove|date=April 2010}}

In [[computing]] and [[telecommunications]], an '''escape character''' is a [[character (computing)|character]] that invokes an alternative interpretation on the following characters in a character sequence. An escape character is a particular case of [[metacharacter]]s. Generally, the judgement of whether something is an escape character or not depends on the context.

In the telecommunications field, escape characters are used to indicate that the following characters are encoded differently. This is used to alter [[control character]]s that would otherwise be noticed and acted on by the underlying telecommunications hardware, such as [[illegal character]]s. In this context, the use of escape characters is often referred to as '''quoting'''.