An escape character is a special character used in programming and text processing to indicate that the following character should be treated differently than usual. For example, in many programming languages, the backslash (\) is used as an escape character. This allows programmers to include characters in strings that would otherwise be interpreted as commands, such as quotation marks or newlines. When an escape character precedes another character, it changes its meaning. For instance, in a string, using \n represents a newline, while \t represents a tab. This functionality is essential for formatting text and managing special characters in code.