The trick is to determine the ascii value of the character. Once you have that you can take its octal value and use ie \035 to match for it, where /s/035/the octal value of that character/. An entirely different approach, although far less likely to work is to simply use . which will match 1 character, regardless of what it is. Ofcourse this depends very heavily on whether the text you're trying to match has a specific order or not.