string quotemeta( string $text )

(PHP 4, PHP 5)

This method was originally intended for escaping characters that are commonly used in a regular expression pattern. This will excape the following characters with a backslash:

For a method that does a more complete job of escaping pattern characters, please check out the function preg_quote.

// Escape special pattern characters using "quotemeta"
$pattern = quotemeta('not\.in*?som(eone)e[lse]s^back+yard');
echo 'Quoted Pattern: ' . htmlspecialchars($pattern) . '<br>';