Forward slash in Java Regex
The problem is actually that you need to double-escape backslashes in the replacement string. You see, "\\/"
(as I'm sure you know) means the replacement string is \/
, and (as you probably don't know) the replacement string \/
actually just inserts /
, because Java is weird, and gives \
a special meaning in the replacement string. (It's supposedly so that \$
will be a literal dollar sign, but I think the real reason is that they wanted to mess with people. Other languages don't do it this way.) So you have to write either:
"Hello/You/There".replaceAll("/", "\\\\/");
or:
"Hello/You/There".replaceAll("/", Matcher.quoteReplacement("\\/"));
(Using java.util.regex.Matcher.quoteReplacement(String)
.)
Double escaping is required when presented as a string.
Whenever I'm making a new regular expression I do a bunch of tests with online tools, for example: http://www.regexplanet.com/advanced/java/index.html
That website allows you to enter the regular expression, which it'll escape into a string for you, and you can then test it against different inputs.