title: Using escape characters inside grep
body: <p>I have the following regular expression for eliminating spaces, tabs, and new lines: <code>[^ \n\t]</code></p>
  
  <p>However, I want to expand this for certain additional characters, such as <code>&gt;</code> and <code>&lt;</code>.</p>
  
  <p>I tried <code>[^ \n\t&lt;&gt;]</code>, which works well for now, but I want the expression to not match if the <code>&lt;</code> or <code>&gt;</code> is preceded by a <code>\</code>.</p>
  
  <p>I tried <code>[^ \n\t[^\\]&lt;[^\\]&gt;]</code>, but this did not work.</p>