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Let's say I've got a regex expression utilizing some of the special chars, but also a portion with 'normal' text that just happens to have some symbols in. Let's also say I'm too lazy to start escaping every "would-be" special character in the 'normal text' part.

How can I enclose the 'normal' text bit so that Regex doesn't start throwing a fit when it thinks it's come across a special character (when really it hasn't) ?

As an example, let's say I search for the text:

.*Hello it's true that ([6*.5]^2=9).

I certainly don't want to laboriously use the escape char each time any of the special chars appears in that maths section (or the apostrophe in "don't"). On the other hand, I DO want to treat the .* bit at the start as special characters.

So can I enclose the Hello it's true that ([6*.5]^2=9) section so that Regex treats it as normal text and not special?

I'm using Notepad++ to do a find and replace, but hopefully, any answer will be the same no matter what the program.

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2 Answers 2

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Some tools allow you to change whether special characters must be escaped by default. For instance, vi (and clones) has a magic mode which controls this. That can let you reduce the amount of escaping needed.

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  • Wow, so there's nothing in the default spec? Just this one thing alone makes me hate Regex more than anything else that might otherwise be wrong with it.
    – Twinbee
    Commented May 23, 2015 at 21:35
  • Someone might recall a different case. The vi "magic" feature by the way is reflected in the differences between BREs and EREs (grep vs egrep), etc.
    – Thomas Dickey
    Commented May 23, 2015 at 21:40
  • I found out that it is possible with most flavours of Regex after all. Bitterness starting to fade... :) See my own answer to this Q.
    – Twinbee
    Commented May 25, 2015 at 12:38
  • Not exactly: it is the Perl-derived flavor which pcre provides, and recent versions of Notepad++ use. POSIX regex's don't do that (though there may be some aspect which I'm overlooking). Perl is not POSIX, of course.
    – Thomas Dickey
    Commented May 25, 2015 at 20:23
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Try \Q to start a literal, and end with \E.

This works with many flavours of Regex, though Java may have problems for instance.

Information obtained from: http://www.regular-expressions.info/characters.html

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