Given that I have a string 's' from somewhere, I'd like to create a regular expression where some part must match that string. The problem is, the 's' could contain characters that have a special meaning in regular expressions. Is there some support function that can provide an escaped version of 's'? Something that transforms "my.*string" into "my\.\*string"? If there isn't, would it be possible/easy to provide one?
Second that request. I just had a need for this, though I wound up ignoring the problem rather than fixing it...
There must be something in the air; I just had a need for this too. My quick-and-dirty solution was to simply replace every non-alphanumeric character with a hex escape sequence (\xNN).
Having it just add escapes to a list of special characters wouldn't work as a general solution, because the list of characters depends on the flags passed to the regex functions. Of course there are settings where my hex-escape solution won't work either. I don't think a general solution is possible without making it part of the library; it needs access to the innards of the regex objects in order to know the exact syntax they recognise.
-- Ross Smith ...................... Pharos Systems, Auckland, New Zealand
"Remember when we told you there was no future?
Well, this is it." -- Blank Reg
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