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I want to replace all whitespace characters in a string with a "+" and all "ß" with "ss"... it works well for "ß", but somehow eclipse won't let me use \s for a whitespace.. I tried "\t" instead, but it doesn't work either.. I get the following error:
Invalid escape sequence (valid ones are \b \t \n \f \r \" \' \ )
this is my code:
try { String temp1 = from.getText().toString(); start_from = temp1.replaceAll("ß", "ss"); start_from = start_from.replaceAll("\s", "+"); } why doesn't it work? is it a problem with android, eclipse or what?
thanks in advance!
631
The regular expression \s is a predefined character class. It indicates a single whitespace character. Let's review the set of whitespace characters: [ \t\n\x0B\f\r] The plus sign + is a greedy quantifier, which means one or more times.
To escape a metacharacter you use the Java regular expression escape character - the backslash character. Escaping a character means preceding it with the backslash character. For instance, like this: \.
A string contains a literal character that is a reserved character in the Regex class (for example, the '(' or open parentheses character). Placing a '\' (backslash) in front of the character in the regular expression generates an 'Invalid escape sequence' compilation error.
\\s - matches single whitespace character. \\s+ - matches sequence of one or more whitespace characters.
You need to escape the slash
start_from = start_from.replaceAll("\\s", "+"); The problem is that \ is an escape character in java as well as regex patterns. If you want to match the regex pattern \n, say, and you'd go ahead and write
replaceAll("\n", "+"); The regex pattern would not end up being \n: it would en up being an actual newline, since that's what "\n" means in Java. If you want the pattern to contain a backslash, you'll need to make sure you escape that backslash, so that it is not treated as a special character within the string.
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