Problem is, regular expressions won't work if %(Text) contains 'reserved' characters such as parentheses:

That's because reserved characters need to be escaped in order for regular expression to know they're supposed to be treated as literal values. The escape character is "\" and it needs to come right before the reserved character. So that would be A\( if you want to look for A(.

I looked into it a bit more though and it looks like we default conditions to be case insensitive for regular expressions as well. You can turn that off by adding (?-i) to the beginning of your regular expression. So (?-i)A\( for matching "A(" but not "a("

I am aware of reserved regex characters as well as options (?i)/(?-i). However, it doesn't make sense to parse and escape strings prior to compare them through a pattern match. What are the alternatives ?

I'm sorry, I don't understand the question. Regular expression syntax requires reserved characters to be escaped, so when you're writing the pattern in that top text box in your screenshot, you need to add the escape characters. The input value (which goes into the second box in the screenshot) does not need escape characters.

Okay let me recap. I have 2 tokens (string values) - say %(Left) and %(Right) - that need to be compared for equality, case sensitive speaking. According to your second last answer, I would need to parse each character in %(Right) and insert an escape character "\" in front of each reserved character (found in %(Right)) prior to evaluate the condition: