Question

I’m trying to replace the beginning of a string with backslashes to something else.
For some weird reason the replaceAll function doesn’t like backslashes.

String jarPath = "\\\\xyz\\abc\\wtf\\lame\\";
jarPath = jarPath.replaceAll("\\\\xyz\\abc", "z:");

What should I do to solve this issue.

Thank you.

Answer 1

You need to double each backslash (again) as the Pattern class that is used by replaceAll() treats it as a special character:

String jarPath = "\\\\xyz\\abc\\wtf\\lame\\";
jarPath = jarPath.replaceAll("\\\\\\\\xyz\\\\abc", "z:");

A Java string treats backslash as an escape character so what replaceAll sees is: \\\\xyz\\abc. But replaceAll also treats backslash as an escape character so the regular expression becomes the characters: \ \ x y z \ a b c