Question

I have a search box in my jsp page . When the user types something in the search box a suggest list is displayed.

I have something like the below code which generates the suggest list dynamically

  sampleQuery.replace(new RegExp("("+query+")","ig"),'Foo'); ...(1)

Now the query object is the string which the user types in the search box. When I typoe in something like “?Foo” in firebug it gives javascript error on line 1. I suspect “?” is part of regular expression that’s why it’s throwing error.

How I can resolve the problem?

Answer 1

You could beforehand either:

• escape all characters with a special meaning (such as ?*|. etc)
• assume all none alphanumerical characters needs to be escaped.

Since the latter is easier I’ll give you an example of it:

query = query.replace(/[^a-zA-Z0-9]/g, "\\$&");
sampleQuery.replace(new RegExp("("+query+")","ig"),'Foo'); ...(1)

Which for the text a?b|.c produces a\?b\|\.c.