Ship a function to quote regular expressions.

[benjamingr]

Hey,

One of the most "obvious" missing features in Node.js regular expressions that every other platform ships is the ability to "escape" them. That is:

var str = prompt("Please enter a string");
str = escape(str);
const re = new RegExp(str, "g"); // handles reg exp special tokens with the replacement.

There are multiple packages doing this subtly incorrectly on NPM - lodash, escape-regexp and a few others.

I've worked on a TC39 proposal to add this API to the language and it is being considered again - but if the language committee rejects the proposal - the next best place is the platform.

My current plan is:

• Try to request that the the language committee add this missing feature. Jordan has helpfully volunteered to raise this in the January TC39 meeting and possibly champion the proposal.
• If TC39 shuts it down - make a PR to add a utility function to Node.js as suggested on that issue.

In regards to other languages and platforms - it seems that some ship this sort of API as part of the language and some do so as part of the platform.

I am opening this issue here for discussion of the plan.

An alternative suggested by some whatwg members is trying to coordinate this sort of API with them.

[benjamingr]

Bikeshedding: util.escapeRegExpString which does the correct thing and keeps up to date with RegExp enhancements sound good to me.

[tniessen]

Your TC39 proposal seems very reasonable to me! 👍

[benjamingr]

TC39 has agreed to promote the proposal to stage 1 - so I'd really rather pursue it there first.

[jasnell]

@benjamingr ... any objections to converting this into a discussion rather than keeping it open as an issue?

[benjamingr]

@jasnell sure