Groovy: Escaping an arbitrary (unknown) regular expression

Question

I want to split a string via String.split(k) where k is an arbitrary string (read from intput). The problem is that k can be any string and thus may include regular expression operators, such as: "*[".

In such cases the split method fires an exception since the regular expression is not well formed.

What I am looking for is a way to escape any given k such that the resulting string can be safely passed on split().

Any thoughts?

Answer 1

You can use Pattern.quote() to escape* regex patterns.

*: 'escapify' sounds rather childish.