Characters
Within regular expressions, most characters represent themselves.The only exceptions are the special characters below:
[ ] ( ) | ^ - + * % _ ? { }
... and the escape character, if it is defined.
A regular expression that contains no special characters or escape characters matches only strings that are identical to itself (subject to the collation in use).That is, it functions just like the ‘=
’ operator:
'Apple' similar to 'Apple' -- true
'Apples' similar to 'Apple' -- false
'Apple' similar to 'Apples' -- false
'APPLE' similar to 'Apple' -- depends on collation