Special characters to escape
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 | ASCII encoding | Description |
|---|---|---|
| % | %25 | Percent sign, used to reference metadata. |
| $ | %24 | Dollar sign, used to reference properties. |
| @ | %40 | At sign, used to reference item lists. |
| ( | %28 | Open parenthesis, used in lists. |
| ) | %29 | Close parenthesis, used in lists. |
| ; | %3B | Semicolon, a list separator. |
| ? | %3F | Question mark, a wildcard character when describing a file spec in an item's Include/Exclude section. |
| * | %2A | Asterisk, a wildcard character when describing a file spec in an item's Include/Exclude section. |
Note
In some scenarios, you may need to escape double quote (") characters, such as when using within an Exec task.