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I'm composing a complex regular expression and the user can supply a part of the expression. However, the user-supplied part should be interpreted literally, i.e. regexp special characters should be escaped. Is there a function for escaping these characters? It seems like a common thing to do but all my googling was unsuccessful.

Example:

(re-search-forward (format "\b%s\b" user-string))

If user-string is test*case, I want to match test*case but not testttttcase.

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up vote 8 down vote accepted

You can use regexp-quote:

This function returns a regular expression whose only exact match is string. Using this regular expression in looking-at will succeed only if the next characters in the buffer are string; using it in a search function will succeed if the text being searched contains string.

(regexp-quote "^The cat$") => \\^The cat\\$

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  • 1
    Great, thanks! But why was this so difficult to find? Sometimes Emacs' documentation drives me crazy. – tmalsburg Jun 17 '15 at 20:53
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    You can describe what you looked for, and where you expected to find about this function, with M-x report-emacs-bug. Perhaps the documentation is lacking and should be fixed. – YoungFrog Jun 17 '15 at 21:07
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    @tmalsburg A useful keyword would be "escape". Perhaps (defalias 'regexp-escape 'regexp-quote). Was this discussed on any of the emacs mailing lists? – ebpa Mar 8 '17 at 4:51

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