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Asked: 2026-05-18T22:05:37+00:00

I am trying to replace forwardslashes with backslashes. To do that i have the

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I am trying to replace forwardslashes with backslashes.
To do that i have the following line of code:

STRING(REGEX REPLACE "/" "\\" SourceGroup ${SourceGroupPath} )

SourceGroupPath = A/File/Path.
SourceGroup is the variable to set the result to.

The problem i am having is with, the “\\” part to the code.
I have tried several ways to getting to use the backslash literal like “\\”
and using unicode but nothing seems to work.

The error i get in CMake is:

CMake Error at CMakeLists.txt:41
(STRING): string sub-command REGEX,
mode REPLACE: replace-expression ends
in a backslash.

Can someone please help me out?

Thanks,

Wouter

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    The reason is that in a CMake string literal, the backslash is an escape character (just like in C, Java or JavaScript) and in regex, the backslash is an escape character as well.

    So to represent a regex as a string literal, you need double escaping. (That’s why many “higher level” languages have regex literal notation, BTW.)

    The string literal "\\" represents the in-memory string "\" and that’s an invalid regex, hence the “ends in a backslash” error.

    The string literal "\\\\" represents "\\" in memory which is a valid regex (representing a single backslash).

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