When specifying the regular expression, use a raw [string literal] (backticks) instead of an interpreted string literal (double quotes) to simplify the syntax. With an interpreted string literal you must escape backslashes. Go's regular expression package implements the [RE2 syntax]. The RE2 syntax is a subset of that accepted by [PCRE], roughly speaking, and with various [caveats]. Note that the RE2 `\C` escape sequence is not supported. [caveats]: https://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp3.html#caveats [PCRE]: https://www.pcre.org/ [RE2 syntax]: https://github.com/google/re2/wiki/Syntax/ [string literal]: https://go.dev/ref/spec#String_literals