What is special about a space in a Ranorex Regex?

Question

In code generated by Ranorex I have seen that spaces are escaped when text comparison is done on Regex basis:

table[@controlid='1008']/?/?/cell[@text~'^This\ text\ has\ spaces']

I wondered about that, because in "normal" (all kinds of different Regex I've seen until now), the space is not a special character.

Googling about it I found the Ranorex XPath site which has the example

listitem[@text~'^sample\ 123$'] matches 'sample 123' (use backslash to escape special characters like space)

Following the examples, there is a list of special characters, as there are

.
$
|
*
+
?
^
()
[]
[^0-9]

It further refers to Microsoft .NET Regex (MSDN), which sounds reasonable, since Ranorex tests are developed on .NET basis with SharpDevelop.

Being a C# develop for 10 years, I'm pretty sure that a space is not a special character in .NET Regex.

What is special about a space in a Ranorex Regex?

Answer 1

There is nothing special about it and spaces do not need to be escaped. It's more likely that Ranorex uses Regex.Escape(), which escapes the spaces (emphasis mine):

Escapes a minimal set of characters (\, *, +, ?, |, {, [, (,), ^, $,., #, and white space) by replacing them with their escape codes.

The following code demonstrates this:

using System;
using System.Text.RegularExpressions;

public class Program
{
    public static void Main()
    {
        Console.WriteLine(Regex.Escape("This text has spaces"));
    }
}