Ripgrep: Option flag to automatically escape regex

[AnthIste]

I mainly use ripgrep to search for stuff in a C# project. By default the search string is a regex which means that namespace separators, method calls and strings must all be escaped with \. These are my primary searches and all of them need copious backslashes:

• Project.Namespace.Whatever -> rg "Project\.Namespace\.Whatever"
• object.Method() -> rg "object\.Method\(\)"
• "string" -> rg "\"string\""

Would it make sense to add an argument that treats the search query as a "raw" string and automatically convert it to a "dumb" escaped regex?

[BurntSushi]

It already exists. It is the -F flag, which is identical to the same flag
in grep.

How could the documentation be improved such that this would have been
clearer to you?

On Jan 3, 2017 3:57 AM, "AnthIste" [e-mail] wrote:

I mainly use ripgrep to search for stuff in a C# project. By default the
search string is a regex which means that namespace separators, method
calls and strings must all be escaped with . These are my primary
searches and all of them need copious backslashes:

• Project.Namespace.Whatever -> rg "Project.Namespace.Whatever"
• object.Method() -> rg "object.Method()"
• "string" -> rg "\"string\""

Would it make sense to add an argument that treats the search query as a
"raw" string and automatically convert it to a "dumb" escaped regex?

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[AnthIste]

How could the documentation be improved such that this would have been
clearer to you?

No really, it can't be more obvious. I just looked through ripgrep --help again and didn't see it. When I copy-pasted the output it jumped out on me.

    -F, --fixed-strings        Treat the pattern as a literal string instead of
                               a regular expression.

Yup, that looks like what I need. I honestly have no idea how I missed that - I even started scratching through the source code before opening an issue.

Thanks for the help!

[BurntSushi]

No problem!

[AnthIste]

Just another question not directly related to this issue:

Is there an option to specify file extensions to search without using the --type-add system? I find myself wanting to do ad-hoc searches on specific combinations of filetypes without necessarily designating a category for them.

[BurntSushi]

@AnthIste Why not just use the -g/--glob flag? e.g., rg -g '*.{foo,bar,baz}' pattern will only search files with an extension foo, bar or baz.

[AnthIste]

That makes sense :+1: I'll try that in future

[partounian]

I tried to use -F but it didn't work when searched for rg '->price'

[okdana]

You need to use -- to tell rg that a pattern beginning with a hyphen isn't supposed to be a command-line option:

rg -- '->price'