Escape Special Character in Regex

c#, escaping, regex

Solution

You can use .NET's built in Regex.Escape for this. Copied from Microsoft's example:

string pattern = Regex.Escape("[") + "(.*?)]"; 
string input = "The animal [what kind?] was visible [by whom?] from the window.";

MatchCollection matches = Regex.Matches(input, pattern);
int commentNumber = 0;
Console.WriteLine("{0} produces the following matches:", pattern);
foreach (Match match in matches)
   Console.WriteLine("   {0}: {1}", ++commentNumber, match.Value);  

// This example displays the following output: 
//       \[(.*?)] produces the following matches: 
//          1: [what kind?] 
//          2: [by whom?]

Problem

Is there a way to escape the special characters in regex, such as `[]()*` and others, from a string? Basically, I'm asking the user to input a string, and I want to be able to search in the database using regex. Some of the issues I ran into are `too many)'s` or `[x-y] range in reverse order`, etc. So what I want to do is write a function to do replace on the user input. For example, replacing `(` with `\(`, replacing `[` with `\[` Is there a built-in function for regex to do so? And if I have to write a function from scratch, is there a way to account all characters easily instead of writing the replace statement one by one? I'm writing my program in C# using Visual Studio 2010

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