quotingescaping
Quoting or escaping is a fundamental concept in computing and programming that refers to the process of handling special characters within strings or data. These special characters, often called metacharacters, have specific meanings to the interpreter, compiler, or shell processing the data and can alter the intended behavior if not properly managed. For instance, in many programming languages, a backslash (\) is used as an escape character. When placed before another character, it signals that the following character should be treated literally, rather than as a special command. For example, in a string, a newline character might be represented as \n. Without the backslash, \n might be interpreted as a literal sequence of characters, but with it, it's understood as a command to move to the next line.
Different contexts have their own set of special characters and escaping mechanisms. In shell scripting, characters