Regular Expressions Cookbook, 2nd Edition

5.14. Escape Regular Expression Metacharacters

Problem

You want to use a literal string provided by a user or from some other source as part of a regular expression. However, you want to escape all regular expression metacharacters within the string before embedding it in your regex, to avoid any unintended consequences.

Solution

By adding a backslash before any characters that potentially have special meaning within a regular expression, you can safely use the resulting pattern to match a literal sequence of characters. Of the programming languages covered by this book, all except JavaScript have a built-in function or method to perform this task (listed in Table 5-3). However, for the sake of completeness, we’ll show how to pull this off using your own regex, even in the languages that have a ready-made solution.

Built-in solutions

Table 5-3 lists the built-in functions and methods designed to solve this problem.

Table 5-3. Built-in solutions for escaping regular expression metacharacters

Language	Function
C#, VB.NET	Regex.Escape(str)
Java	Pattern.quote(str)
XRegExp	XRegExp.escape(str)
Perl	quotemeta(str)
PHP	preg_quote(str, [delimiter])
Python	re.escape(str)
Ruby	Regexp.escape(str)

Notably absent from the list is JavaScript (without XRegExp), which does not have a native function designed for this purpose.

Regular expression

Although it’s best to use a built-in solution if available, you can pull this off on your own by using the following regular expression along with the appropriate replacement ...