How to escape all characters with special meaning in Regex

Question

I just stumbled upon the following which I can\'t quite get my head around. When you create a new Regexp in Ruby like so:

Regexp.new(\'http://www.example.com\')
         


        

Answer 1

You can do:

Regexp.escape('http://www.example.com')

That will return the fully escaped string

Answer 2

Alternatively, if you just need to check whether a given text contains the specified url you can use String#include?, and drop the regex altogether. Bearing in mind that Ruby will just do simple string comparisons, this should also be faster.

# before
if text =~ Regexp.new(Regexp.escape('http://www.example.com'))
  ...
end

# after
if text.include?('http://www.example.com')
  ...
end