>>I’m working on a re-write of the VFP app GoFish (search and replace tool). One thing I am doing with the new version is that internally I’m using Regular Expressions to perform the search rather than the original way it worked which was that it just used the $ function to look for a string match.
>>
>>So the user will enter a search string which could very likely contain some characters that are reserved characters in regular expressions. (i.e. ^[]\{}.,;+-$ etc.) I need to escape those characters in the user input so the reg ex search will work properly.
>>
>>There are lots of way one could iterate over the input string to escape all the special characters, and I’m sure there are some trick one must figure out to do it correctly, so, before I re-invent the wheel here, I’m asking around to see if anyone already has the code to do this.
>>
>>Anyone?
>

>

>
>You use regex to change the search string
>
>

>	local regexObj
>	local specialChars, specialCharsPattern, replacePattern
>	
>	local i
>	
>	specialChars = '\^$.[]()|{}*+?'
>	
>	replacePattern = '\$&' && or '\$1'
>	regexObj = createObject('VBScript.RegExp')
>	regexObj.IgnoreCase = false
>	regexObj.Global = true
>	
>	&& construct specialCharsPattern
>	specialCharsPattern = '('
>	
>	for i = 1 to len(m.specialChars)
>		specialCharsPattern = m.specialCharsPattern  + '\' + substr(m.specialChars, m.i, 1) + '|'
>	endfor
>	specialCharsPattern = left(m.specialCharsPattern, len(m.specialCharsPattern)-1) + ')'
>	
>	regexObj.Pattern = m.specialCharsPattern
>	
>	
>	&& examples
>	local inputSearchString, useSearchString
>	
>	inputSearchString = m.specialChars
>	useSearchString= regexObj.Replace(m.inputSearchString , m.replacePattern )
>	?'inputSearchString: ', m.inputSearchString
>	?'useSearchString: ', m.useSearchString
>	
>	
>	inputSearchString = 'a( $ )'
>	useSearchString= regexObj.Replace(m.inputSearchString , m.replacePattern )
>	?'inputSearchString: ', m.inputSearchString
>	?'useSearchString: ', m.useSearchString
>

More efficient to just do

specialChars = "(\\|\^|\$|\.|\[|\]|\(|\)|\||\{|\}|\*|\+|\?)"

and get rid of the for/endfor ?