In computer programming, regular expressions are a powerful tool for matching patterns in text. These patterns can include special characters such as square brackets [], question marks ?, asterisks *, plus signs +, pipe symbols |, curly braces {}, backslashes \\, parentheses (), at symbols @, periods ., and various newline and carriage return characters such as \n and \r. By using regular expressions, programmers can search for and manipulate text in a precise and flexible way. However, when handling user input, it's important to properly escape these special characters to prevent security vulnerabilities such as Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) attacks. The `escapeLinkRegex` function provided by the VTEX Store Framework is one way to do this, by matching and escaping any of these special characters that may appear in a link.