Bash – n easy way to pass a “raw” string to grep

grep can't be fed "raw" strings when used from the command-line, since some characters need to be escaped to not be treated as literals. For example:

$ grep '(hello|bye)' # WON'T MATCH 'hello'
$ grep '\(hello\|bye\)' # GOOD, BUT QUICKLY BECOMES UNREADABLE

I was using printf to auto-escape strings:

$ printf '%q' '(some|group)\n'
\(some\|group\)\\n

This produces a bash-escaped version of the string, and using backticks, this can easily be passed to a grep call:

$ grep `printf '%q' '(a|b|c)'`

However, it's clearly not meant for this: some characters in the output are not escaped, and some are unnecessarily so. For example:

$ printf '%q' '(^#)'
\(\^#\)

The ^ character should not be escaped when passed to grep.

Is there a cli tool that takes a raw string and returns a bash-escaped version of the string that can be directly used as pattern with grep? How can I achieve this in pure bash, if not?