Regular Expression Match Operator escape character

Hi,

We're running PostgreSQL v8.2.3 on RHEL5.

In some places in our application, we use Regular Expression Match Operator
(~* => Matches regular expression, case insensitive) inside WHERE criteria.

Example:
SELECT ... 
FROM ...
WHERE (SKILLS ~*
'(^|\\^|\\||[^0-9|^a-z|^A-Z]|$)C#(^|\\^|\\||[^0-9|^a-z|^A-Z]|$)' OR SKILLS ~*
'(^|\\^|\\||[^0-9|^a-z|^A-Z]|$).NET(^|\\^|\\||[^0-9|^a-z|^A-Z]|$)')

In this case, we're trying to search/match for either "C#" OR ".NET" in
SKILLS column.

My question here is, do I need to escape the characters "#" and "."  here?

Regards,
Gnanam