Is escape character "\" indicate a grouping? Thank you

Hi Hanwen!

When you escape a character in RegEx (put \ before it), then that character is interpreted as that character literally and not as some other RegEx-related symbol.

This is not RegEx related, but illustrates how escape characters work.

Consider this code:

const str = 'This is my sister's coat'; // Note: s coat is NOT part of the string

It will error, because the apostrophe in sister's will be interpreted as the end of the string.

(Because there are actually 3 single quotes.)

One way to easily fix the issue is with an escape character.

If you instead type it this way:

const str = 'This is my sister\'s coat';

JS will interpret the middle single quote as literally a single quote character and NOT the end of the string.

(In fact, the MarkDown color coding really shows the difference, if you noticed it.)

The \ plays the same role in RegEx.

Does that make sense?

More info:

https://www.regular-expressions.info/characters.html

https://javascript.info/regexp-escaping

I hope that helps.

Stay safe and happy coding!