How to input special character in cmd?

Question

I have written a c program that retrieves arguments from the command line under Windows. One of the arguments is a regular expression. So I need to retrieve special characters such as "( , .", etc., but cmd.exe treats "(" as a special character. How could I input these special character? thanks.

Accepted Answer

You can put the arguments in quotes:

```
myprogram.exe "(this is some text, with special characters.)"
```

Though I wouldn't assume that parentheses cause problems unless you are using blocks for conditional statements or loops in a batch file. The usual array of characters that are treated specially by the shell and need quoting or escaping are:

```
& | > < ^
```

If you use those in your regular expression, then you need quotes, or escape those characters:

```
myprogram "(.*)|[a-f]+"
myprogram (.*)^|[a-f]+
```

(`^` is the escape character which causes the following character to be not interpreted by the shell but instead used literally)

How to input special character in cmd?

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