Question

In Perl regular expressions, you can surround a subexpression with \Q and \E to indicate that you want that subexpression to be matched as a literal string even if there are metacharacters in there. You also have the quotemeta function that inserts exactly the right number of backslashes in a string so that if you subsequently interpolate that string into a regular expression, it will be matched literally, no matter what its contents were.

Does Javascript (as deployed in major browsers) have any built in equivalent? I can write my own just fine, but I would like to know if I don’t have to bother.

Answer 1

There is no such built-in feature.

Rather than implementing your own, I advise you look into the multitude of regex escape functions available on the internet.

That page proposes the following solution (by Colin Snover):

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

or advises to use the XRegExp library.