Finally, certain special characters are referred to by special notation based on the backslash (\) (see Fig. 2 .10). The most common of these are the newline character newline \n and the tab character \t. To refer to characters that are special themselves (like ., *, [, and \) , precede them with a backslash, (i.e., /\./, /\*/, /\[/, and /\\/).