Javascript + Regex = Nothing to repeat error?

Question

I\'m new to Regex and I\'m trying to work it into one of my new projects to see if I can learn it and add it to my repitoire of skills. However, I\'m hitting a roadblock her

Answer 1

You need to double the backslashes used to escape the regular expression special characters. However, as @Bohemian points out, most of those backslashes aren't needed. Unfortunately, his answer suffers from the same problem as yours. What you actually want is:

The backslash is being interpreted by the code that reads the string, rather than passed to the regular expression parser. You want:

"[\\[\\]?*+|{}\\\\()@.\n\r]"

Note the quadrupled backslash. That is definitely needed. The string passed to the regular expression compiler is then identical to @Bohemian's string, and works correctly.