---
title: Escaping Regular Expressions
slug: ps/help/en_us/vtm/tsg/escaping-regular-expressions
docTags: 
createdAt: 2026-08-02T09:41:21.259Z
---

Several TrafficScript functions take regular expressions as arguments. TrafficScript uses the PCRE regular expression library.

Regular expressions might contain a number of special characters:

- . matches any single character.
- ? indicates that the previous expression is optional.
- \* matches any number of the previous expression.
- ^ matches the beginning of a string.
- $ matches the end of a string.

If you want to match a literal period (.), or other special character in your regular expression, escape it with a backslash (\\) character.

Like many other scripting languages, double-quoted TrafficScript strings use “\” as an escape character, so to place a regular expression like “^192\\.168\\.” into a TrafficScript double-quoted string, you must double-escape the “\” character:

```bash
# Sets the regex string as ^192\.168\.
# The two examples below have the same effect
$regex = "^192\\.168\\.";
$regex = '^192\.168\.';
if ( string.regexMatch( $ip, $regex ) ) {
  # IP is on 192.168.* network
}
```

Note that it’s not often necessary to use regular expressions in TrafficScript for the following reasons:

- To search strings, you can use string.IPMaskMatch(), string.Contains(), string.startsWith() and string.endsWith().
- To search and replace within strings, you can use string.replace() and string.replaceAll().