As far as I can see, there is no way to embed a plain string into a regex, without escaping the string. Same with characters. Isn't that a bad omission for a library that becomes the new C++ standard? Escaping something just to unescape it on the other end of the function call seems unnecessary, and it opens up the possibility of ills like regex code injection if someone forgets to escape or does it wrong.
Good question - if this is Boost.Regex rather than the std then there is an option to treat a whole string as a literal (as Jim Bell mentioned), or you can enclose part of a string that has to be treated as a literal in \Q...\E as in Perl. Otherwise you're looking at a call to regex_replace to quote things for you, off the top of my head something like: regex e("[.\[\]{}()\\\\*+?|^$]"); std::string my_escaped_string = "(?:" + regex_replace(my_string, e, "\\\\$&") + ")"; Should do the trick. HTH, John.