Simon Willison’s Weblog

tc39/proposal-regex-escaping. I just heard from Kris Kowal that this proposal for ECMAScript has been approved for ECMA TC-39:

Almost 20 years later, @simon’s RegExp.escape idea comes to fruition. This reached “Stage 4” at ECMA TC-39 just now, which formalizes that multiple browsers have shipped the feature and it’s in the next revision of the JavaScript specification.

I'll be honest, I had completely forgotten about my 2006 blog entry Escaping regular expression characters in JavaScript where I proposed that JavaScript should have an equivalent of the Python re.escape() function.

It turns out my post was referenced in this 15 year old thread on the esdiscuss mailing list, which evolved over time into a proposal which turned into implementations in Safari, Firefox and soon Chrome - here's the commit landing it in v8 on February 12th 2025.

One of the best things about having a long-running blog is that sometimes posts you forgot about over a decade ago turn out to have a life of their own.