ezsystems/ezpublish — comment on commit c274c86c9b526dd5f9ac2866df941099b7eb66e4
File:  line 0
By patrickallaert:

@vidarl
Mhhhh, not really, there is nothing to escape as a dot has no special meaning as 2nd argument of RewriteRule.
Dot should only be escaped in 1st one as this is a Perl compatible regular expression argument.
The reason why:

RewriteRule .* /index\.php

works is because:

$ cat index\.php

or even:

$ cat \i\n\d\e\x\.\p\h\p

works.
No more, no less.