How do I do global string replace without needing to escape everything?

Question

I want to replace all occurences of a pattern in a string by another string. For example, lets convert all \"$\" to \"!\":

\"$$$\" -> \"!!!\"

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Answer 1

There is no standard regexp escape function in Javascript.

You can write your own (source) or get it from your library (dojo example)

function escape(s) {
    return s.replace(/[-/\\^$*+?.()|[\]{}]/g, '\\$&')
};

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This allows us to create the custom regex object at runtime

function replace_all(string, pattern, replacement){
    return string.replace( new RegExp(escape(pattern), "g"), replacement);
}