Star - look for the character * in a string using regex

Question

I am trying to find the following text in my string : '***' the thing is that the C# Regex mechanism doesnt allow me to do the following:

new Regex("***", RegexOptions.CultureInvariant | RegexOptions.Compiled);

due to

ArgumentException: "parsing "*" - Quantifier {x,y} following nothing."

obviously it thinks that my stars represents regular expressions, is there a way to tell the Regex mechanism to treat stars as just stars and nothing else?

Answer 1

* in Regex means:

Matches the previous element zero or more times.

so that, you need to use \* or [*] instead.

explain:

\

When followed by a character that is not recognized as an escaped character in this and other tables in this topic, matches that character. For example, \* is the same as \x2A.

[ character_group ]

Matches any single character in character_group.

Answer 2

You need to escape the star with a backslash: @"\*"