neo4j/cypher/Lucene: Dealing with special characters by Mark Needham.
Mark outlines how to handle “special characters” in Lucene (indexer for Neo4j), only to find that an escape character for a Lucene query is also a special character for Cypher, which itself must be escaped.
There is a chart in Mastering Regular Expressions by Jeffrey E F Friedl of “special” characters but that doesn’t cover all the internal parsing choices software.
Over the last sixty plus years there has been little progress towards a common set of “special” characters in computer science.
Handling of “special” characters lies at the heart of accessing data and all programs have code to account for them.
With no common agreement on “special” characters, what reason would you offer to expect convergence elsewhere?