Question

I have a problem with the % and / characters in Java regex. The following example will illustrate my issue:

Pattern pattern = Pattern.compile("^[a-z]*[/%]$");
Matcher m = pattern.matcher("a%/");
System.out.println(m.find());

It prints “false” when I expect it to be “true”. The % and / sign shouldn’t have to be escaped but even if I do it still dosn’t work.

So my question is simply why?

Answer 1

^[a-z]*[/%]$ matches zero or more lower case letters followed by one character which can be either / or % – to allow multiple characters, use

^[a-z]*[/%]+$

+ stands for one or more; use * for zero or more.

If you didn’t have $ at the end of the regex, it would have matched a% in the stringa%/.

$ matches end of line.