How to escape text for regular expression in Java

Does Java have a built-in way to escape arbitrary text so that it can be included in a regular expression? For example, if my users enter "$5", I'd like to match that exactly rather than a "5" after the end of input.

Since Java 1.5, yes:

Pattern.quote("$5");

Difference between Pattern.quote and Matcher.quoteReplacement was not clear to me before I saw following example

s.replaceFirst(Pattern.quote("text to replace"), 
               Matcher.quoteReplacement("replacement text"));

It may be too late to respond, but you can also use Pattern.LITERAL, which would ignore all special characters while formatting:

Pattern.compile(textToFormat, Pattern.LITERAL);

I think what you're after is \Q$5\E. Also see Pattern.quote(s) introduced in Java5.

See Pattern javadoc for details.