Convert a string to regular expression ruby

This method will safely escape all characters with special meaning:

/#{Regexp.quote(your_string)}/

For example, . will be escaped, since it's otherwise interpreted as 'any character'.

Remember to use a single-quoted string unless you want regular string interpolation to kick in, where backslash has a special meaning.


To be clear

  /#{Regexp.quote(your_string_variable)}/

is working too

edit: wrapped your_string_variable in Regexp.quote, for correctness.


Looks like here you need the initial string to be in single quotes (refer this page)

>> str = '[\w\s]+'
 => "[\\w\\s]+" 
>> Regexp.new str
 => /[\w\s]+/