Is there a PHP function that can escape regex patterns before they are applied?

Question

Is there a PHP function that can escape regex patterns before they are applied?

I am looking along the lines of the C# Regex.Escape function.

Answer 1

preg_quote() is what you are looking for:

preg_quote() takes str and puts a backslash in front of every character that is part of the regular expression syntax. This is useful if you have a run-time string that you need to match in some text and the string may contain special regex characters.

The special regular expression characters are: . \ + * ? [ ^ ] $ ( ) { } = ! < > | : -