Escape string special characters for use in golang regexp

I have an array of characters like this :

chars := []string{".", "-", "(", ")"}

When I join them in regular way (strings.Join(chars, "")) and pass it to regexp.MustCompile, Its panic :

panic: regexp: Compile(`[.-()]`): error parsing regexp: invalid character class range: `.-(`

How can I scape string special characters for use in golang regexp as a character not regexp operator?

You must put the - item at the start/end of the array so that - appears either at the start - [-.()] - or end - [.()-] - of the character class.

Or escape the - in the chars array: "\\-".

NOTE: That is not the only caveat, the ^ and ] must also be escaped, or placed in a specific location in the character class. The \ must be escaped always.

See a Go demo:

package main

import (
	"fmt"
	"strings"
	"regexp"
)

func main() {
	chars := []string{"]", "^", "\\\\", "[", ".", "(", ")", "-"}
	r := strings.Join(chars, "")
	s := "[Some]-\\(string)^."
	re := regexp.MustCompile("[" + r + "]+")
	s = re.ReplaceAllString(s, "")
	fmt.Println(s)
}

Output: Somestring

Note that the ^ must not be the first item, ] must be at the start and - at the end.

Now there is an even better way:

regexp.MustCompile( regexp.QuoteMeta(strings.Join(chars, "")) )

regexp.QuoteMeta() will create a regular expression that matches the string provided exactly (i.e. it will escape all the regex meta-characters).