3.14 (THIS IS WRONG!)

This would indeed match "3.14", but it would also match "3514", "3f14", or even "3+14". In short, any string of the form "3x14", where x is any character, would be matched by the regular expression above. To get around this, we introduce a second metacharacter, the backslash (\). The backslash can be used to indicate that the character immediately to its right is to be taken literally. Thus, to search for the string "3.14", we would use:

3\.14 (This will work.)