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I just want to create a regular expression out of any possible string.
var usersString = "Hello?!*`~World()[]"; var expression = new RegExp(RegExp.escape(usersString)) var matches = "Hello".match(expression); Is there a built-in method for that? If not, what do people use? Ruby has RegExp.escape. I don't feel like I'd need to write my own, there have got to be something standard out there.
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The \ is known as the escape code, which restore the original literal meaning of the following character. Similarly, * , + , ? (occurrence indicators), ^ , $ (position anchors) have special meaning in regex. You need to use an escape code to match with these characters.
In order to use a literal ^ at the start or a literal $ at the end of a regex, the character must be escaped. Some flavors only use ^ and $ as metacharacters when they are at the start or end of the regex respectively. In those flavors, no additional escaping is necessary. It's usually just best to escape them anyway.
Now, escaping a string (in regex terms) means finding all of the characters with special meaning and putting a backslash in front of them, including in front of other backslash characters. When you've done this one time on the string, you have officially "escaped the string".
The function linked in another answer is insufficient. It fails to escape ^ or $ (start and end of string), or -, which in a character group is used for ranges.
Use this function:
function escapeRegex(string) { return string.replace(/[-\/\\^$*+?.()|[\]{}]/g, '\\$&'); } While it may seem unnecessary at first glance, escaping - (as well as ^) makes the function suitable for escaping characters to be inserted into a character class as well as the body of the regex.
Escaping / makes the function suitable for escaping characters to be used in a JavaScript regex literal for later evaluation.
As there is no downside to escaping either of them, it makes sense to escape to cover wider use cases.
And yes, it is a disappointing failing that this is not part of standard JavaScript.
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