What is the SpecialVersion in a NuGet package version?

Question

When looking over the source code of NuGet.Core , I noticed that SemanticVersion has a constructor public SemanticVersion(Version version, string specialVersion) ...

What exactly is this specialVersion? Can anyone give an example of how it looks on a real NuGet package?

Answer 1

Special version is used with pre-release NuGet packages where part of the version number includes an arbitrary string.

So if you have a pre-release package with the version:

   1.1.2-beta1

The special version will be beta1 .