Create a case-insensitive regular expression from a string in Ruby

Question

Let's say that I have an arbitrary string like

`A man + a plan * a canal : Panama!`

and I want to do a regex search for strings that are the same other than case. That is, this regular expression should match the string

`a man + A PLAN * a canal : PaNaMa!`

I take it the best approach is to backslash-escape every character with a special meaning in Ruby regular expressions, and then do Regexp.new with that string and Regexp::IGNORECASE as arguments. Is that right? Is there a tried-and-true regular expression for converting arbitrary strings into literal regular expressions?

By the way, I ultimately want to use this regular expression to do an arbitrary case-insensitive MongoDB query. So if there's another way I could be doing that, please let me know.

Colin O'Dell · Accepted Answer · 2014-04-02 17:25:19Z

63

Ruby regexes can interpolate expressions in the same way that strings do, using the #{} notation. However, you do have to escape any regex special characters. For example:

input_str = "A man + a plan * a canal : Panama!"
/#{Regexp.escape input_str}/i

edited Apr 2, 2014 at 17:25

Colin O'Dell

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answered Apr 2, 2014 at 17:07

David Tresner-Kirsch

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2 Comments

Steve Midgley Over a year ago

This is such a great answer - it reads way better than the top voted response and feels more like Ruby to me to boot. Hope others will upvote this too..

cdpalmer Over a year ago

I agree, I just upvoted this answer that now ties the accepted answer! One more vote!

sepp2k · Accepted Answer · 2010-08-06 18:09:43Z

58

You can use Regexp.escape to escape all the characters in the string that would otherwise be handled specially by the regexp engine.

Regexp.new(Regexp.escape("A man + a plan * a canal : Panama!"), Regexp::IGNORECASE)

or

Regexp.new(Regexp.escape("A man + a plan * a canal : Panama!"), "i")

answered Aug 6, 2010 at 18:09

sepp2k

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2 Comments

Trevor Burnham Over a year ago

Thanks, that was just what I was looking for! (Though as to MongoDB, I realized that if I'm doing this kind of search often, I should really store a downcased version of the string for performance reasons.)

Ahmed Kooli Over a year ago

Used this in a clash of code competition :D

BigRon · Accepted Answer · 2017-11-18 00:36:46Z

34

If you know the regular expression you want already, you can add "i" after the expression (eg /the center cannot hold it is too late/i) to make it case insensitive.

edited Nov 18, 2017 at 0:36

BigRon

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answered Aug 7, 2010 at 7:46

Andrew Grimm

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2 Comments

Trevor Burnham Over a year ago

Right, but that's not the question I'm asking. I have an arbitrary string (from user input), not a regular expression. If the user enters a+b, for example, I want to be able to find A+b, a+B, or A+B, not aaaaab.

user2066657 Over a year ago

I can't unify what you wrote just above with your original question. Consider revising your question?

rusty · Accepted Answer · 2012-11-20 17:28:33Z

10

A slightly more syntactic-sugary way to do this is to use the %r notation for Regexp literals:

input_str = "A man + a plan * a canal : Panama!"
%r(#{Regexp.escape(input_str)})i

Of course it comes down to personal preference.

answered Nov 20, 2012 at 17:28

rusty

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