This is working as expected. regexp.QuoteMeta only works on a complete regular expression. Your example is taking the result of regexp.QuoteMeta and putting [ and ] around it to form a new regular expression, and using that. That doesn't work. You need to pass the complete string, including the [ and ], to regexp.QuoteMeta. You can't add them later and expect sensible behavior.

https://play.golang.org/p/qR1Dz0M5l7B

Here's a version with the braces included in the regexp.QuoteMeta(). Passing the complete string for conversion to regex by MustCompile, with braces included, just escapes the braces and yields a regex that looks for the whole group of symbols together, rather than any of the symbols in the set.

Escaping the braces is to be expected, though, since the example for QuoteMeta in the documentation demonstrates exactly that.

https://play.golang.org/p/VAHU5YbWyTv

Okay, final go at this for right now. This has a bunch of cases, and shows the output from regexp.QuoteMeta() ... the output does not appear to be correct, because minus signs are not escaped, which leaves them to be treated as a regular expression range metacharacter, which is not the behaviour described in the documentation.

The only reason that one case works here, at all, is that if the "-" is at the end of the string to escape and then compile, it gets treated as escaped (even though it's not, I guess?) because there's nothing after it to suggest that it should be treated as a regex range metachar...

You can further demonstrate this by putting another character class in the string to escape, like 1a-+, which will fail to compile and panic if you add the braces after quotemeta, and again, won't do anything, if you add the braces to the string arg to quotemeta:

Panic version
https://play.golang.org/p/xEiaho_ADVO

No panic, no minus
https://play.golang.org/p/d0p_ca5BIB3

No panic, with minus
https://play.golang.org/p/vLGqPE7LTIr

So something is wrong, unless there is a reason for QuoteMeta not to escape "-" despite use as a metachar...

Minus signs do not have to be quoted, because they are not regexp meta-characters. The fact that they are special inside of [] doesn't matter here, because regexp.QuoteMeta doesn't return a string that behaves specially inside [].

What regexp.QuoteMeta does is take a string of characters and return a regular expression that matches exactly that string of characters. If you think there is a bug here, please show a test case where that fails.

Oh. Huh. I didn't realize that - isn't considered a meta-character generally, or that it errors if you try to escape it outside of []. My apologies, just didn't quite match my assumptions. Thank you!