How to Escape Special Characters in PowerShell

When working on PowerShell, you might need to escape special characters like *\~;(%?.:@/. This tutorial will teach you to remove and escape such characters in PowerShell using the -Replace operator.

Use the -Replace Operator to Escape Special Characters in PowerShell

The -Replace operator replaces texts or characters in PowerShell. You can use it to remove texts or characters from the string.

The -Replace operator requires two arguments: the string to find and the string to replace from the given input.

This is our string variable containing special characters as follows.

$new = "p*o$#we%r"

To remove all special characters from the string, you can replace them with an empty string. The backslash \ escape character matches the character that is not recognized.

For example, \* matches an asterisk *.

$new = $new -replace "\*", ""
$new = $new -replace "\$", ""
$new = $new -replace "\#", ""
$new = $new -replace "%", ""
$new

Output:

power

The [RegEx]::Escape("input") returns the escape codes that will help you to escape special characters in a string.

[regex]::Escape("p*o$#we%r")

Output:

p\*o\$\#we%r