Regex Escape Tool

This tool escapes a string so it can be matched literally inside a regular expression, adding backslashes before the characters that regex treats as special. Regular expressions give certain characters special meaning: the dot matches any character, the asterisk and plus mean repetition, brackets and parentheses group and define sets, and so on. When you want to match one of those characters literally, as the actual character rather than its special function, you must escape it with a backslash. Building a regex that contains user input, a file path, a price, or any text with special characters is a common source of bugs and even security issues, because an unescaped special character changes what the pattern matches. Escaping the text first solves this. This tool does it for you. You paste your string, and the calculator inserts a backslash before every character that has special meaning in a regular expression, producing a version safe to drop into a pattern where it will match exactly. The result updates as you type and runs entirely in your browser. Use it when building a regex that must contain a literal piece of text, when constructing patterns dynamically from variables, or to avoid the bugs that come from unescaped special characters. The characters escaped are the standard regex metacharacters, including the dot, asterisk, plus, question mark, caret, dollar, braces, brackets, parentheses, pipe, backslash and forward slash. After escaping, the string can be inserted into a larger pattern and will match the original text character for character, with no special behaviour. This is exactly what programming languages do with their built-in regex-quote or escape functions, and doing it here lets you prepare a literal fragment by hand, or simply understand which characters need escaping and why. For any pattern that must include text you do not control, escaping first is the safe habit.

Escapes regex metacharacters: . * + ? ^ $ { } [ ] ( ) | \ and /. The result matches the original text literally inside a pattern. Runs entirely in your browser.