Certain special character constructs are allowed literally in Java regular expressions. Here they are:
| Special Character | Meaning |
| c | A character with the octal value c |
| cc | A character with the octal value cc |
| ncc | A character with the octal value ncc, where n cannot be more than 3 |
| xhh | A character with the hexadecimal value 0xhh |
| uhhhh | A character with the hexadecimal value 0xhhhh |
| x{h...h} | A character with the hexadecimal value 0xh...h, where h must be a valid CODE_POINT |
| Newline character or u000A | |
| Tab character or u0009 | |
| Carriage return character or u000D | |
| f | Form feed character or u000C |
| e | Escape character or uu001B |
| a | Bell character or u0007 |
| cn | A control character represented by n |