How to: Escape Special Characters in MSBuild
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
Certain characters have special meaning in MSBuild project files. Examples of the characters include semicolons (;) and asterisks (*). For a complete list of these special characters, see MSBuild Special Characters.
In order to use these special characters as literals in a project file, they must be specified by using the syntax %xx, where xx represents the ASCII hexadecimal value of the character.
MSBuild Special Characters
One example of where special characters are used is in the Include attribute of item lists. For example, the following item list declares two items: MyFile.cs and MyClass.cs.
<Compile Include="MyFile.cs;MyClass.cs"/>
If you want to declare an item that contains a semicolon in the name, you must use the %xx syntax to escape the semicolon and prevent MSBuild from declaring two separate items. For example, the following item escapes the semicolon and declares one item named MyFile.cs;MyClass.cs.
<Compile Include="MyFile.cs%3BMyClass.cs"/>
To use an MSBuild special character as a literal character
- 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.