Many of those have special meaning inside a regular expression, so I suggest you try them one at a time when in doubt.

The backslash will need to become a foursome (\\\\), and other known special characters include the dot, asterisk, dollar-sign, etc..

Here's part of the manpage:
Code:
   Regular Expressions
       Regular expressions are the extended kind found in egrep.
       They are composed of characters as follows:

       c          matches the non-metacharacter c.
       \c         matches the literal character c.
       .          matches any character including newline.
       ^          matches the beginning of a string.
       $          matches the end of a string.
       [abc...]   character list, matches any of the characters abc....
       [^abc...]  negated character list, matches any character except abc....
       r1|r2      alternation: matches either r1 or r2.
       r1r2       concatenation: matches r1, and then r2.
       r+         matches one or more r’s.
       r*         matches zero or more r’s.
       r?         matches zero or one r’s.
       (r)        grouping: matches r.
       r{n}
       r{n,}
       r{n,m}     One or two numbers inside braces denote an interval expression.  If there is one number
                  in  the  braces,  the preceding regular expression r is repeated n times.  If there are
                  two numbers separated by a comma, r is repeated n to m times.  If there is  one  number
                  followed by a comma, then r is repeated at least n times.
                  Interval expressions are only available if either --posix or --re-interval is specified
                  on the command line.

       \y         matches the empty string at either the beginning or the end of a word.

       \B         matches the empty string within a word.

       \<         matches the empty string at the beginning of a word.

       \>         matches the empty string at the end of a word.

       \w         matches any word-constituent character (letter, digit, or underscore).

       \W         matches any character that is not word-constituent.

       \‘         matches the empty string at the beginning of a buffer (string).

       \’         matches the empty string at the end of a buffer.

       The escape sequences that are valid in string constants (see below)  are  also  valid  in  regular
       expressions.


Edited by mlord (13/01/2009 21:59)