Escape regex special characters

Escape user text so it can be inserted into a regular expression literally.

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ToolRegex Escape
Input
Output
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Preview

How it works

Regex metacharacters receive safe escapes so their operator meaning is removed; the result can be embedded as one literal fragment. The operation protects dynamic patterns from accidental wildcards and injection.

  • Escaping is for literal fragments, not complete expressions.
  • Backslashes need another escaping layer inside string literals.

Worked example

Escape URL special characters for regex
Escape special regex characters in a URL for literal matching
Input
											https://example.com/path?q=1&r=2
Output
												https://example\.com/path\?q=1&r=2

When to use this

Search boxes, log filters, and fixture-generated patterns escape user text.

Edge cases

  • Hyphens inside character classes need position-aware handling.
  • A backslash must survive the host language string parser.
  • Escaping an entire expression disables intended operators.

References