Bug 2104 – std.regex: escape function for regular expressions

I've been using regular expressions extensively and found that there was no escape function in the std.regexp library. It's useful when using user input in regular expressions. Here's a simple one I built. It's probably not the most efficient one out there, but feel free to use it. string regEscape(string aExpression) { return sub(aExpression, r"[\\\.\*\+\?\^\$\[\]\{\}\(\)\|]", "\\$&", "g"); } Usage: string needle1 = r"[needle]"; string needle2 = r"(needle)"; string haystack = r"[needle] (needle)"; // find needles 1 and/or 2 in the haystack auto result = RegExp(regEscape(needle1) ~ "|" ~ regEscape(needle2)).search(haystack); Cheers, Boyd

Makes sense for new std.regex as well.

Commits pushed to master at https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/phobos https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/phobos/commit/cf6152c13fb1215f6e97c79f8189ce7a015a047b Fix issue 2104 - escape function for regular expressions https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/phobos/commit/4e393eb70a99599811f74a991a5685388c689243 Merge pull request #4156 from DmitryOlshansky/issue-2104 Fix issue 2104 - escape function for regular expressions