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for metacharacters such as \d (digit), \D (non-digit), \s (space), \S (non-space), \w (word), \W (non-word). to escape special regex characters, e.g., \. for . , \+ for + , \* for * , \? for ? . You also need to write \\ for \ in regex to avoid ambiguity.
To match any of the metacharacters literally, one needs to escape these characters using a backslash ( \ ) to suppress their special meaning. Similarly, ^ and $ are anchors that are also considered regex metacharacters.
\\. matches the literal character . . the first backslash is interpreted as an escape character by the Emacs string reader, which combined with the second backslash, inserts a literal backslash character into the string being read. the regular expression engine receives the string \.
Use the \ character to escape a character that has special meaning inside a regular expression.
To automate it, you could use this:
function escapeRegExp(text) {
return text.replace(/[-[\]{}()*+?.,\\^$|#\s]/g, '\\$&');
}
Update: There is now a proposal to standardize this method, possibly in ES2016: https://github.com/benjamingr/RegExp.escape
Update: The abovementioned proposal was rejected, so keep implementing this yourself if you need it.
Use the backslash to escape a character. For example:
/\\d/
This will match \d instead of a numeric character
With \ you escape special characters
Escapes special characters to literal and literal characters to special.
E.g:
/\(s\)/matches '(s)' while/(\s)/matches any whitespace and captures the match.
Source: http://www.javascriptkit.com/javatutors/redev2.shtml
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