Regex escaping

[lionel-rowe]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

https://github.com./tc39/proposal-regex-escaping/ has been in TC39 purgatory for almost 8 years now and it's still at stage 1, despite what seems to be fairly wide consensus that it's a useful feature that should be standardized. In light of that, it seems like a good candidate for inclusion in a standard library, for later deprecation if and when the proposal ever gets rolled out.

Describe the solution you'd like

A function called something like regexEscape with an API something like this:

export declare function regexEscape(str: string): string

Ideally, it'd support contexts both within and outside of character classes, as well as all flavors of regex, including the upcoming v flag. It'd escape the minimal set of characters needed to be agnostic to all those contexts (i.e. no escaping of non-ASCII characters or always-literal characters like _), and for other characters, it would use the most readable escape where possible (e.g. \. for a literal period), falling back to hex escapes where that's impossible (e.g. \x3c for <).

Describe alternatives you've considered

Wait another 8 years I guess? 😅

Alternative APIs would involve versions that take options (e.g. specifying flags or whether the context is within a character class or not) or exporting different versions of the function for these use cases. Both of these options would make the implementation significantly more complex.

[lino-levan]

I'm in favor of this proposal. @lionel-rowe are you willing to open a PR?

[lionel-rowe]

@lionel-rowe are you willing to open a PR?

Happy to at some point, not sure when I'll get around to it though.