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Convert to Regular Expression escapes colons

Posted by Faux on Mon 24 Jan 2005 10:20 AM — 3 posts, 17,637 views.

Faux United Kingdom #0
As far as I can determine, the colon (":") character doesn't require escaping in regular expressions?

eg.
Entering 
Fish: Monkey
and pressing `Convert to Regular Expression` produces: 
^Fish\: Monkey$
Poromenos Greece #1
Nick just kinda went crazy with those and added backslashes everywhere, since the Regex docs say that it doesn't hurt.
Amended on Mon 24 Jan 2005 02:59 PM by Poromenos
Nick Gammon Australia Forum Administrator #2
It's not really a bug. The regexp will work, but I think that it would be a bug to escape (say) 1 because \1 has a special meaning. However escaping special characters is just being "safe".