Use the \ character to escape a character that has special meaning inside a regular expression.

To automate it, you could use this:

function escapeRegExp(text) {

return text.replace(/[-[\]{}()*+?.,\\^$|#\s]/g, '\\$&');

}

Update: There is now a proposal to standardize this method, possibly in ES2016: https://github.com/benjamingr/RegExp.escape

Update: The abovementioned proposal was rejected, so keep implementing this yourself if you need it.