[Beaver-devel] Fixed strings inside extended regular expressions

[Michael Terry]

Hello.  I am working again on Beaver after a long break.  :)

For searching, I would like to construct a regular expression from the 
user's input string.  However, I sometimes want to treat the input 
string as a fixed string (that is, match '*' with only the character '*' 
and such), but want to surround this fixed string with regular 
expression syntax.

For example, let's say I have the string "o.*g".  I want to prefix and 
postfix this with some regular expression, let's say to make it 
"^(o.*g)$".  But, I want the middle part to only match the character 
sequence "o.*g", not an 'o' followed by a 'g' sometime later.

Anyone know how to do this?  (As a brute force strategy, I could 
surround each letter in the user string with '[' and ']', but that seems 
ugly, especially since I'd have to be careful with characters like '^'.)

-mt

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