Does any common regex format/dialect require '\-' for a literal hyphen? AFAIK it's only special inside character classes, and escaping it doesn't necessarily work there if it would form a valid range identifier.
I don't know of any that require it. But it's common to see punctuation characters escaped like that because Perl (and PCRE and its various cousins/descendants) allows you to escape any non-meta-character and have it treated as a literal.
I suppose the two main benefits are
(a) neither the writer nor the reader has to remember which punctuation characters are meta-characters (you just have to remember that it's always a literal if it's escaped), and
(b) in implementations like PHP's which try to replicate the Perl-style 'delimited' syntax (e.g., /foo/), it prevents characters in the pattern from conflicting with the delimiters.
Maybe there's some other advantage but i can't think of what.
I suppose the two main benefits are
(a) neither the writer nor the reader has to remember which punctuation characters are meta-characters (you just have to remember that it's always a literal if it's escaped), and
(b) in implementations like PHP's which try to replicate the Perl-style 'delimited' syntax (e.g., /foo/), it prevents characters in the pattern from conflicting with the delimiters.
Maybe there's some other advantage but i can't think of what.