Why do escape characters in regex mismatch?

Question

1. If I want to match the dot symbol (.) I have to write this regex:

   /\\./

Escape character is needed to match the

Answer 1

The . character is a reserved regular expression keyword. The d isn't. You need to include the escape character when you match a period to explicitly tell regex that you want to use the period as a normal matching character. d by itself isn't a reserved word, so you don't need to escape it, but \d is a reserved word.

I can see how, to someone coming to regex it can be a little odd, but the . is used so often, and I can't think of a time I've really needed to match periods it just makes more sense to have it be one character without the backslash.