Regex Escaping Issues

Users discuss problems escaping special characters like backslashes, asterisks, and regex metacharacters in Hacker News comments, often due to markdown rendering for italics and code blocks, while solving regex puzzles or sharing patterns.

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Keywords

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Sample Comments

petdance Nov 6, 2013 View on HN

Learn this one weird trick to match a backslash!

vilya Dec 10, 2011 View on HN

Character classes would trip you up, I think. e.g. \w for word characters.

samwillis Jun 29, 2023 View on HN

They probably need to replace /^[\d\w!@#$%^&*-]$/i with /[^\w\d]/g.

mhitza Jul 9, 2022 View on HN

That regex doesn't do what the description above it says, with or without a backslash.

jandrese Aug 7, 2019 View on HN

Isn't this what the /s flag is for in your regex? Assuming you are also using /x of course.

mikorym Nov 1, 2019 View on HN

Wow, forgot about the \asterisk being a reserved character.

jey Apr 16, 2007 View on HN

Feature request: a way to escape an asterisk. Sometimes you do want to write a literal asterisk. (E.g. to say "a times b")

klyrs Dec 12, 2021 View on HN

At least use a backslash... escape the asterisk and you get sh*t not sht sht.

Bother - forgot that asterisks have a special meaning. Sorry about the formatting.

eru May 14, 2010 View on HN

Did you try to escape your ^ like \^?