In computing and telecommunications, an escape character is a character (more specifically a metacharacter) that, based on a contextual convention, specifies an alternative interpretation of the sequence of characters that follow it. The escape character plus the characters that follow it to form a syntactic unit is called an escape sequence. A convention can define any particular character code as a sequence prefix. Some conventions use a normal, printable character such as backslash (\) or ampersand (&). Others use a non-printable (a.k.a. control) character such as ASCII escape.
In telecommunications, an escape character is used to indicate that the following characters are encoded differently. This is used to alter control characters that would otherwise be noticed and acted on by the underlying telecommunications hardware, such as illegal characters. In this context, the use of an escape character is sometimes referred to as quoting.
