I have an android application where I have to find out if my user entered the special character '\' on a string. But i'm not obtaining success by using the string.replaceAll() method, because Java recognizes \ as the end of the string, instead of the " closing tag. Does anyone have suggestions of how can I fix this?
Here is an example of how I tried to do this:
private void ReplaceSpecial(String text) {
if (text.trim().length() > 0) {
text = text.replaceAll("\", "%5C");
}
It does not work because Java doesn't allow me. Any suggestions?
Try this: You have to use escape character '\'
text = text.replaceAll("\\\\", "%5C");
Try
text = text.replaceAll("\\\\", "%5C");
replaceAll uses regex syntax where \ is special character, so you need to escape it. To do it you need to pass \\ to regex engine but to create string representing regex \\ you need to write it as "\\\\" (\ is also special character in String and requires another escaping for each \)
To avoid this regex mess you can just use replace which is working on literals
text = text.replace("\\", "%5C");
The first parameter to replaceAll is interpreted as a regular expression, so you actually need four backslashes:
text = text.replaceAll("\\\\", "%5C");
four backslashes in a string literal means two backslashes in the actual String, which in turn represents a regular expression that matches a single backslash character.
Alternatively, use replace instead of replaceAll, as recommended by Pshemo, which treats its first argument as a literal string instead of a regex.
text = text.replaceAll("\", "%5C");
Should be:
text = text.replaceAll("\\\\", "%5C");
Why?
Since the backward slash is an escape character. If you want to represent a real backslash, you should use double \ (\\)
Now the first argument of replaceAll is a regular expression. So you need to escape this too! (Which will end up with 4 backslashes).
Alternatively you can use replace which doesn't expect a regex, so you can do:
text = text.replace("\\", "%5C");
First, since "\" is the escape character in Java, you need to use two backslashes to get one backslash. Second, since the replaceAll() method takes a regular expression as a parameter, you will need to escape THAT backslash as well. Thus you need to escape it by using
text = text.replaceAll("\\\\", "%5C");
I could be late but not the least.
Add \\\\ following regex to enable \.
Sample regex:
private val specialCharacters = "-#%\\[\\}+'!/#$^?:;,\\(\"\\)~`.*=&\\{>\\]<_\\\\"
private val PATTERN_SPECIAL_CHARACTER = "^(?=.*[$specialCharacters]).{1,20}$"
Hope it helps.
Related
I have this regex :
^(([A-Z]:)|((\\|/){1,2}\w+)\$?)((\\|/)(\w[\w ]*.*))+\.([txt|exe]+)$
but every time I assign it to any string, Eclipse returns me invalid escape sequences, I have inserted a backward slash but it gives me the same error.
How to assign the above expression to string in java?
Replace all "\\" with "\\\\". Java has no language support for regular expressions. So you'll need "\\" to get a backslash from the Compiler into the String. If the regular expression shall contain an escaped backslash, you need "\\\\".
final String re = "^(([A-Z]:)|((\\\\|/){1,2}\\w+)\\$?)((\\\\|/)(\\w[\\w ]*.*))+\\.([txt|exe]+)$"
Try the following:
String regex = "^(([A-Z]:)|((\\\\|/){1,2}\\w+)\\$?)((\\\\|/)(\\w[\\w ]*.*))+\\.([txt|exe]+)$";
The backslash character itself needs to be escaped as well, so you would end up with four \ characters.
I have stream of data coming from different feeds which I need to clean up.
Data is in specific format and if some sentence spans through multiple lines it is separated using "\"(backslash), which I want to remove. \ is also present in other part of text for escaping quotes etc and I don't want to remove these backslashes. So eventually I want to remove "\\n".
I have tried following regex for removing \ and \n but it didn't work :
singleLine.replaceAll("(\\\\n|\\\\r)", "");
I am not sure what regex would work in this case.
Regex isn't really necessary for this; If I were you, I would use...
singleLine=singleLine.replace("\\\\n", "");
Many people think the replace method only replaces one, but in fact the only difference is that replaceAll uses regex, while replace simply replaces exact matches of the String.
If you do want to use regex though, I believe you have to do \\\\\\\\ (you have to 'nullify' the escape character in Java, and in regex, so x4, not just x2)
Explaining this some more
The only other issue is in your example, you never set singeLine equal to anything; I'm not sure if you hid that, or missed that.
Edit:
Explaining the reasoning for \\\\\\\\ some more, Java requires that you do "\\" to represent one \. Regex also has a use for the \ character, and requires you do the same again for it. If you just "\\" in Java, the regex parser essentially receives "\", it's escape character for certain things. You need to give the regex parser two of them, to escape it, so in Java, you need to do "\\\\" just to represent a match for a single "\"
You'll need 5 backslash characters for each pattern in that regexp.
Use:
singleLine.replaceAll("(\\\\\n|\\\\\r)", "");
The backslash character is both an escape sequence in your string and an escape sequence in the regexp. So to represent a literal \ in a regexp you'll need to use 4 \ characters - your regexp needs \\ to get an escaped backslash, and each of those needs to be escaped in the java String - and then another to represent either \n or \r.
String str = "string with \\\n newline and \\\n newline ...";
String repl = str.replaceAll("(\\\\\n|\\\\\r)", "");
System.out.println("str: " + str);
System.out.println("repl: " + repl);
Output:
STR: string with \
newline and \
newline ...
REPL: string with newline and newline ...
You need to assign the return value to another String object, or the same object, because of String immutability.
singleLine = singleLine.replaceAll("(\\\\n|\\\\r)", "");
More info is here
Remember that Strings are immutable. This means that replaceAll() does not change the String in singleLine. You must use the return value to get the modified String. For example, you can do
singleLine = singleLine.replaceAll("(\\\\n|\\\\r)", "");
In Java, I am trying to split on the ^ character, but it is failing to recognize it. Escaping \^ throws code error.
Is this a special character or do I need to do something else to get it to recognize it?
String splitChr = "^";
String[] fmgStrng = aryToSplit.split(splitChr);
The ^ is a special character in Java regex - it means "match the beginning" of an input.
You will need to escape it with "\\^". The double slash is needed to escape the \, otherwise Java's compiler will think you're attempting to use a special \^ sequence in a string, similar to \n for newlines.
\^ is not a special escape sequence though, so you will get compiler errors.
In short, use "\\^".
The ^ matches the start of string. You need to escape it, but in this case you need to escape it so that the regular expression parser understands which means escaping the escape, so:
String splitChr = "\\^";
...
should get you what you want.
String.split() accepts a regex. The ^ sign is a special symbol denoting the beginning of the input sequence. You need to escape it to make it work. You were right trying to escape it with \ but it's a special character to escape things in Java strings so you need to escape the escape character with another \. It will give you:
\\^
use "\\^". Use this example as a guide:
String aryToSplit = "word1^word2";
String splitChr = "\\^";
String[] fmgStrng = aryToSplit.split(splitChr);
System.out.println(fmgStrng[0]+","+fmgStrng[1]);
It should print "word1,word2", effectively splitting the string using "\\^". The first slash is used to escape the second slash. If there were no double slash, Java would think ^ was an escape character, like the newline "\n"
None of the above answers makes no sense. Here is the right explanation.
As we all know, ^ doesn't need to be escaped in Java String.
As ^ is special charectar in RegulalExpression , it expects you to pass in \^
How do we make string \^ in java? Like this String splitstr = "\\^";
I have the following string
\Qpipe,name=office1\E
And I am using a simplified regex library that doesn't support the \Q and \E.
I tried removing them
s.replaceAll("\\Q", "").replaceAll("\\E", "")
However, I get the error Caused by: java.util.regex.PatternSyntaxException: Illegal/unsupported escape sequence near index 1
\E
^
Any ideas?
\ is the special escape character in both Java string and regex engine. To pass a literal \ to the regex engine you need to have \\\\ in the Java string. So try:
s.replaceAll("\\\\Q", "").replaceAll("\\\\E", "")
Alternatively and a simpler way would be to use the replace method which takes string and not regex:
s.replace("\\Q", "").replace("\\E", "")
Use the Pattern.quote() function to escape special characters in regex for example
s.replaceAll(Pattern.quote("\Q"), "")
replaceAll takes a regular expression string. Instead, just use replace which takes a literal string. So myRegexString.replace("\\Q", "").replace("\\E", "").
But that still leaves you with the problem of quoting special regex characters for your simplified regex library.
String.replaceAll() takes a regular expression as parameter, so you need to escape your backslash twice:
s.replaceAll("\\\Q", "").replaceAll("\\\\E", "");
You can also use the below. I used this because i was matching and replacing a text wrapped and the Q & E would stay in the pattern. This way it doesn't.
final int flags = Pattern.LITERAL;
regex = "My regex";
pattern = Pattern.compile( regex, flags );
I'm trying to convert the String \something\ into the String \\something\\ using replaceAll, but I keep getting all kinds of errors. I thought this was the solution:
theString.replaceAll("\\", "\\\\");
But this gives the below exception:
java.util.regex.PatternSyntaxException: Unexpected internal error near index 1
The String#replaceAll() interprets the argument as a regular expression. The \ is an escape character in both String and regex. You need to double-escape it for regex:
string.replaceAll("\\\\", "\\\\\\\\");
But you don't necessarily need regex for this, simply because you want an exact character-by-character replacement and you don't need patterns here. So String#replace() should suffice:
string.replace("\\", "\\\\");
Update: as per the comments, you appear to want to use the string in JavaScript context. You'd perhaps better use StringEscapeUtils#escapeEcmaScript() instead to cover more characters.
TLDR: use theString = theString.replace("\\", "\\\\"); instead.
Problem
replaceAll(target, replacement) uses regular expression (regex) syntax for target and partially for replacement.
Problem is that \ is special character in regex (it can be used like \d to represents digit) and in String literal (it can be used like "\n" to represent line separator or \" to escape double quote symbol which normally would represent end of string literal).
In both these cases to create \ symbol we can escape it (make it literal instead of special character) by placing additional \ before it (like we escape " in string literals via \").
So to target regex representing \ symbol will need to hold \\, and string literal representing such text will need to look like "\\\\".
So we escaped \ twice:
once in regex \\
once in String literal "\\\\" (each \ is represented as "\\").
In case of replacement \ is also special there. It allows us to escape other special character $ which via $x notation, allows us to use portion of data matched by regex and held by capturing group indexed as x, like "012".replaceAll("(\\d)", "$1$1") will match each digit, place it in capturing group 1 and $1$1 will replace it with its two copies (it will duplicate it) resulting in "001122".
So again, to let replacement represent \ literal we need to escape it with additional \ which means that:
replacement must hold two backslash characters \\
and String literal which represents \\ looks like "\\\\"
BUT since we want replacement to hold two backslashes we will need "\\\\\\\\" (each \ represented by one "\\\\").
So version with replaceAll can look like
replaceAll("\\\\", "\\\\\\\\");
Easier way with replaceAll
To make out life easier Java provides tools to automatically escape text into target and replacement parts. So now we can focus only on strings, and forget about regex syntax:
replaceAll(Pattern.quote(target), Matcher.quoteReplacement(replacement))
which in our case can look like
replaceAll(Pattern.quote("\\"), Matcher.quoteReplacement("\\\\"))
Even better: use replace
If we don't really need regex syntax support lets not involve replaceAll at all. Instead lets use replace. Both methods will replace all targets, but replace doesn't involve regex syntax. So you could simply write
theString = theString.replace("\\", "\\\\");
To avoid this sort of trouble, you can use replace (which takes a plain string) instead of replaceAll (which takes a regular expression). You will still need to escape backslashes, but not in the wild ways required with regular expressions.
You'll need to escape the (escaped) backslash in the first argument as it is a regular expression. Replacement (2nd argument - see Matcher#replaceAll(String)) also has it's special meaning of backslashes, so you'll have to replace those to:
theString.replaceAll("\\\\", "\\\\\\\\");
Yes... by the time the regex compiler sees the pattern you've given it, it sees only a single backslash (since Java's lexer has turned the double backwhack into a single one). You need to replace "\\\\" with "\\\\", believe it or not! Java really needs a good raw string syntax.