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Subject:
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New help with Pattern for special characters
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Posted By:
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2BOrNot2B
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Post Date:
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7/2/2008 4:03:55 PM
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Hi.
I am currently working with Pattern and Matcher in Java.
I have the following strings:
Boys play balls. Girls play dolls. Baby likes bottles.
I like to create a pattern to find the period and space(s) in the string. This is my pattern so far, ".\\s+". It doesn't work because the "." in my pattern could mean any character.
How do I make my pattern to recognize it as a period, and not any character.
Please help.
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Reply By:
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Old Pedant
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Reply Date:
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7/2/2008 4:17:36 PM
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\.
Most special characters can be escaped by preceding them with a back slash. (Which of course needs to be two slashes because Java treats the single one as its *own* escape.)
So, the pattern would be
"\\.\\s+"
I tend to escape all special characters at all times, just for the paranoia of it. Even when I don't have to.
For example, I'll tend to use
"[a-z\\[\\-]"
even though I know in my head that no backslashes are needed there. But guess what: Most of the time my patterns work first time. I'll take the extra typing in place of the extra debugging.
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