Question

I’m passing a string to a function and that string is not a regexp. Inside that function, I’m calling another function which takes a regexp.

The problem I’m having is that I’m passing, say:

"i.."

which does not represent a regexp and I’d then like to “convert” it to a regexp that shall match that exact string.

For example, I take it converting my non-regexp “i..” to:

"i[.][.]"

would work in my case because then that regexp would match “i..”.

I’m looking for something that would work with most characters but it’s not a big deal if I cannot use ‘[‘ and ‘]’ in my input string.

So how can I programmatically “wrap” my non-regexp string into a regexp automatically so that that regexp matches my exact (non-regexp) string?

Answer 1

you are looking for the regexp-quote function.