Bug 20217 – Regex literals don't escape double quotes

You can't create a regex literal that contains an escaped double quote in it. Example: import std.regex; import std.stdio; void main() { auto re = regex(r"\""); // r`"` doesn't work either writeln(re); } Errors: source/app.d(4,16): Error: unterminated string constant starting at source/app.d(4,16) source/app.d(4,16): Error: Implicit string concatenation is deprecated, use "\\" ~ "" instead source/app.d(7,1): Error: semicolon expected following auto declaration, not End of File source/app.d(7,1): Error: found End of File when expecting } following compound statement

Note that there's no such thing as a regex literal in D, they are just different types of strings. The r"xxx" string specifically does not have escaping. If you want that, you can try plain "" strings. Or if you want to go raw, use the `string`. But the key thing to remember is they are all strings, there's nothing special about using it with the regex function.

Ah, that makes much more sense. It wasn't clear to me that they were the same when I was reading https://dlang.org/articles/regular-expression.html, though reading it again, there are two examples of using regex without the r"" prefix.