Strangely I can't seem to find anywhere a list of the characters that I can't safely use as literals within MySQL regular expression square brackets without escaping them or requiring the use of a [:character_class:] thing.
(Also the answer probably needs to be MySQL specific because MySQL regular expressions seem to be lacking compared those in Perl/PHP/Javascript etc).
Almost all metacharacters (including the dot ., the +, * and ? quantifiers, the end-of-string anchor $, etc.) have no special meaning in character classes, with a few notable exceptions:
], for obvious reasons^, which is used to negate the character class (eg: [^ab] matches any character but a and b).-, which is used to denote a range (eg: [0-9] matches any digit)However, these can still be added without escaping if placed in strategic locations within the character class:
[]a] matches ] or a.[a^] matches ^ or a[-a] and [a-] both match a and -.More information can be found in the man page on POSIX regex (thanks Tomalak Geret'kal!)