Home/ Questions/Q 9093915
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-06-16T23:13:30+00:00

I’m trying to do a simple regex that searches for a few characters and

  • 0

I’m trying to do a simple regex that searches for a few characters and such within sections, including looking for the . literal. However, the Pattern compiler is saying it isn’t valid.

The following is an excerpt from the full regex that throws the format exception. The escape looks right, it just sees the . as something that shouldn’t be escaped.

([a-zA-Z0-9_-\.\s]{1,})
              ^

I have also tried "([a-zA-Z0-9_-\\\\.\\s]{1,})" (same as above but with two \ to escape the .) with no luck.

All of the resources I could find on the internet for escaping the dot character have stated this should work.

What am I missing?

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Problem is not in . but in - before it. Try "([a-zA-Z0-9_\\-.\\s]{1,})"

    - is metacharacter in character class [...]. It specifies range of characters like [a-z] can match character between a and z (inclusive) in Unicode Table. If you use it in place where there will be no possibility to treat is as range operator like at start or end of character class [-...] [...-] it will be treated as normal character so in that cases you will not have to escape it. Otherwise you will need to use \ before it to change it into simple literal.

    • 0