escape special characters in oracle

http://docs.oracle.com/cd/B10500_01/text.920/a96518/cqspcl.htm

https://forums.oracle.com/forums/thread.jspa?threadID=466604

SET ESCAPE ON;

Escape Characters

To query on words or symbols that have special meaning to query expressions such as and & or| accum, you must escape them. There are two ways to escape characters in a query expression:

Escape Character	Description
{}	Use braces to escape a string of characters or symbols. Everything within a set of braces in considered part of the escape sequence. When you use braces to escape a single character, the escaped character becomes a separate token in the query.
\	Use the backslash character to escape a single character or symbol. Only the character immediately following the backslash is escaped.

In the following examples, an escape sequence is necessary because each expression contains a Text operator or reserved symbol:

'AT\&T'
'{AT&T}'

'high\-voltage'
'{high-voltage}'

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Note:

If you use braces to escape an individual character within a word, the character is escaped, but the word is broken into three tokens.

For example, a query written as high{-}voltage searches for high - voltage, with the space on either side of the hyphen.