Question

I am trying to look for specific phrase inside large text, but the phrase may contain characters like “[“, “(“, “*”, … like “name1 (name2”, but it causes an invalid exception when looking for it. Here is my code :

Pattern myPattern = Pattern.compile( "\\b" + phrase + "\\b" );  // Exception
Matcher myMatcher = myPattern.matcher( largeText );

I have tried to use quote(…) to fix such characters but it didn’t work :

phrase = Pattern.quote( phrase );

How can i fix this to allow such characters ?

Answer 1

Pattern.quote(phrase) works just fine:

String largeText = "a()b a()c a()b";
String phrase = "a()b";
Pattern myPattern = Pattern.compile( "\\b" + Pattern.quote(phrase) + "\\b" );
Matcher myMatcher = myPattern.matcher( largeText );
while(myMatcher.find()) {
  System.out.println(myMatcher.group());
}

prints:

a()b
a()b