How to properly escape characters in regexp

Question

I want to do a string search inside a string. Simply saying MySTR.search(Needle).

The problem occurs when this needle string contains speci

Answer 1

I'm just dipping my feet in Javascript, but is there a reason you need to use the regex engine at all? How about

var sNeedle = '*Stars!*';
var sMySTR = 'The contents of this string have no importance';
if ( sMySTR.indexOf(sNeedle) > -1 ) {
   //found it
}