Parse Error. Cannot parse escaped dots.

[TheSeamau5]

This code:

import Text (asText)

main = asText "\."

causes the following error:

Parse error at (line 4, column 19):
(line 1, column 3):
unexpected "."
expecting space, "&" or escape code

While this may seem like normal behavior for string, strings are also used to define regular expressions. So for example, a regular expression to parse emails is :

"[a-z0-9._+-]{1,20}@[a-z0-9]{3,15}\.[a-z]{2,4}"

and this string yields a parse error due to the escaped periord towards the end (cuz, you know, emails end in .com or .fr or something)

[TheSeamau5]

Sorry, I just saw the warning in the regex docs saying:

Be careful to escape backslashes properly! 
For example, "\w" is escaping the letter w which is probably not what you want. 
You probably want "\\w" instead, which escapes the backslash.

[TheSeamau5]

Sorry, I just saw the warning in the regex docs saying:

Be careful to escape backslashes properly! 
For example, "\w" is escaping the letter w which is probably not what you want. 
You probably want "\\w" instead, which escapes the backslash.