Question

Possible Duplicate:
regular expression for DOT

Say I have a String:

String domain =  "www.example.com";

To extract the word “example” I am using the split function in java

String[] keys = domain.split(".");
String result = keys[1];

Clearly this is wrong because the “.” is a wrong regular expression since it matches any character.

What is the escape sequence which matches specifically the character “.”?

Though this question does seem trivial but I can’t seem to find any quick reference or previous answers. Thanks.

Answer 1

You can get the regular expression for any literal string by using Pattern.quote().

Pattern.quote(“.”) evaluates to “\\.”

In this case it would probably be clearer just to use \\.