Re: Special characters in patterns: what about \?

["Mauro Iazzi" <mauro.iazzi@...>]

The backslash is still considered escape at string constructor level.
It is discarded before it arrives to gsub. Then gsub does not even
know it was there and interprets the ^ as negating next char (it needs
at least one). Anytime you want a backslash in a string just insert it
twice.