Question

Usually when my regex patterns look like this:

http://www.microsoft.com/

Then i have to escape it like this:

string.match(/http:\/\/www\.microsoft\.com\//)

Is there another way instead of escaping it like that?

I want to be able to just use it like this http://www.microsoft.com, cause I don’t want to escape all the special characters in all my patterns.

Answer 1

Regexp.new(Regexp.quote('http://www.microsoft.com/'))

Regexp.quote simply escapes any characters that have special regexp meaning; it takes and returns a string. Note that . is also special. After quoting, you can append to the regexp as needed before passing to the constructor. A simple example:

Regexp.new(Regexp.quote('http://www.microsoft.com/') + '(.*)')

This adds a capturing group for the rest of the path.