For my website I use the dataTable plugin and to give the user the possibility to filter the results. I implemented some filter, which are dynamically loaded from the results and contains the all different values of each column.

As more than one filter can be bined, I deactived the smart search and had to active the regEx-search instead. All these things are working fine.

My Problem is: I have content like "content (another content)", and for those contents containing brackets, the search doesn't work (no result is found).

Is there a possibility to mask the searchString before calling:

table.column('myColumn:name').search(searchString, true, false, true).draw();

I tried to replace the string with "\)" or something like this, but that doesn't help. If I just delete those special characters the results can't be found either as regEx search needs exact strings.

Can anyone help me please?

For my website I use the dataTable plugin and to give the user the possibility to filter the results. I implemented some filter, which are dynamically loaded from the results and contains the all different values of each column.

As more than one filter can be bined, I deactived the smart search and had to active the regEx-search instead. All these things are working fine.

My Problem is: I have content like "content (another content)", and for those contents containing brackets, the search doesn't work (no result is found).

Is there a possibility to mask the searchString before calling:

table.column('myColumn:name').search(searchString, true, false, true).draw();

I tried to replace the string with "\)" or something like this, but that doesn't help. If I just delete those special characters the results can't be found either as regEx search needs exact strings.

Can anyone help me please?

• javascript
• jquery
• regex
• datatables

1 Answer 1

SOLUTION

You can add and use a function escapeRegExp() that will escape special characters as found in MDN - Regular Expressions article:

function escapeRegExp(string){
  return string.replace(/[.*+?^${}()|[\]\\]/g, "\\$&");
}

// ... skipped ...

table.column('myColumn:name').search(escapeRegExp(searchString), true, false, true).draw();

DEMO

See this jsFiddle for code and demonstration.