How to Escape Regular Expression Special Characters in JavaScript?

Escaping Regular Expression Special Characters in JavaScript

When working with regular expressions in JavaScript, it becomes necessary to escape special characters that hold particular meanings within such expressions. This measure prevents them from being interpreted as part of the pattern, which can lead to unexpected results.

To escape a special character using JavaScript, simply precede it with a backslash (). For instance, to escape the plus ( ) character, which signifies one or more occurrences, you would use .

For automated escaping of all special characters, you can employ the following function:

function escapeRegExp(text) {
  return text.replace(/[-[\]{}()*+?.,\^$|#\s]/g, '\$&');
}

In this function, the g flag ensures that all occurrences of special characters are escaped within the provided text string.

Example:

var escapedString = escapeRegExp('[munees]waran');
console.log(escapedString); // Outputs: \[munees\]waran

Recent Developments:

Initially, there was a proposal to introduce a standardized method for escaping regular expressions in ES2016. However, this proposal was ultimately rejected.

Current Recommendation:

Despite the lack of a standardized method, it remains recommended to use the function provided above to automate the escaping of regular expression special characters in JavaScript.

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