Illegal character


In computer science, an illegal character is a character that is not allowed by a certain programming language, protocol, or program. To avoid illegal characters, some languages may use an escape character which is a backslash followed by another character.

Examples

Windows

In the Windows operating system, illegal characters in file and folder names include colons, brackets, question marks, and null characters.
CharacterName
<less than
>greater than
:colon
"speech marks
/forward slash
\backslash
|pipe
?question mark
*asterisk