Converting user input string to regular expression

Here is a one-liner: str.replace(/[|\\{}()[\]^$+*?.]/g, '\\$&')

I got it from the escape-string-regexp NPM module.

Trying it out:

escapeStringRegExp.matchOperatorsRe = /[|\\{}()[\]^$+*?.]/g;
function escapeStringRegExp(str) {
    return str.replace(escapeStringRegExp.matchOperatorsRe, '\\$&');
}

console.log(new RegExp(escapeStringRegExp('example.com')));
// => /example\.com/

Using tagged template literals with flags support:

function str2reg(flags = 'u') {
    return (...args) => new RegExp(escapeStringRegExp(evalTemplate(...args))
        , flags)
}

function evalTemplate(strings, ...values) {
    let i = 0
    return strings.reduce((str, string) => `${str}${string}${
        i < values.length ? values[i++] : ''}`, '')
}

console.log(str2reg()`example.com`)
// => /example\.com/u

var flags = inputstring.replace(/.*\/([gimy]*)$/, '$1');
var pattern = inputstring.replace(new RegExp('^/(.*?)/'+flags+'$'), '$1');
var regex = new RegExp(pattern, flags);

or

var match = inputstring.match(new RegExp('^/(.*?)/([gimy]*)$'));
// sanity check here
var regex = new RegExp(match[1], match[2]);

Use the JavaScript RegExp object constructor.

var re = new RegExp("\\w+");
re.test("hello");

You can pass flags as a second string argument to the constructor. See the documentation for details.

Use the RegExp object constructor to create a regular expression from a string:

var re = new RegExp("a|b", "i");
// same as
var re = /a|b/i;