Question

If you have a string with special characters that you want to match with:

System.Text.RegularExpressions.Regex.Matches(theTextToCheck, myString);

It will obviously give you wrong results, if you have special characters inside myString like “%” or “\”.

The idea is to convert myString and replacing all occurences of special characters like “%” to be replaced by their corresponding characters.

Does anyone know how to solve that or does someone have a RegEx for that? 🙂

Update:
The following characters have a special meaning, that I should turn of with adding a leading backslash: \, &, ~, ^, %, [, ], {, }, ?, +, *,(,),|,$

are there any others I should replace?

Answer 1

As @Kobi links to in the comments, you need to use Regex.Escape to ensure that that regular expression string is properly escaped.

Escapes a minimal set of characters (\, *, +, ?, |, {, [, (,), ^, $,., #, and white space) by replacing them with their escape codes. This instructs the regular expression engine to interpret these characters literally rather than as metacharacters.