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Special Characters to Escape

Note

This article applies to Visual Studio 2015. If you're looking for the latest Visual Studio documentation, see Visual Studio documentation. We recommend upgrading to the latest version of Visual Studio. Download it here

Special characters must be escaped only if they have special meaning in the context in which they are being used. For example, the asterisk (*) is a special character only in the "Include" and "Exclude" attributes of an item definition, or in a call to CreateItem. In all other cases, the asterisk is treated as a literal asterisk. While you do not need to escape asterisks everywhere in project files, doing so does no harm.

Use the notation %xx in place of the special character, where xx represents the hexadecimal value of the ASCII character. For example, to use an asterisk (*) as a literal character, use the value %2A.

The full list of special characters to escape follows:

Character Description
% Percent sign, used to reference metadata.
$ Dollar sign, used to reference properties.
@ At sign, used to reference item lists.
( Open parenthesis, used in lists.
) Close parenthesis, used in lists.
` Apostrophe (or tick mark), used in conditions and other expressions.
; Semicolon, a list separator.
? Question mark, a wildcard character when describing a file spec in an item's Include/Exclude section.
* Asterisk, a wildcard character when describing a file spec in an item's Include/Exclude section.

See Also

How to: Escape Special Characters in MSBuild
MSBuild Reference