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There is a common requirement to perform simple string replacement (for example, replace all occurrences of "M. Kay" with "Michael Kay"). This is tricky to achieve using the replace() function because (a) the second argument is treated as a regular expression, which means that characters like "." have a special meaning, and (b) the characters "$" and "\" have a special meaning in the replacement string. Some possible approaches to meeting this requirement are (a) a function to escape all metacharacters in a string (change "M. Kay" to "M\. Kay"), (b) a new function replace-strings(), (c) a new flag for use in the flags argument of replace().
Accepted at Austin face-to-face meeting; this will need an example in the specification, and the WGs preferred "q" for "quote" rather than "l" for "literal", partly because no "letter ell" clarification is needed (easier to read in queries etc.) and partly by analogy with \Q in some regexp libraries.
Text implementing this new feature has been added to the editor's draft of the F+O specification.
Since the functionality to meet this requirement is in the current editor's draft (new "q" flag), I am marking this as closed.