Question

The following seemingly innocuous pattern is causing a PatternSyntaxException:

String pattern = "^(?:.*)\\s*{$"; // pattern is:   ^(?:.*)\s*{$

As you can see when you look at it in regexpal, it seems to work properly there.

For example, that string should match:

name {

The message I’m getting back is “Illegal repetition near index 9”, but I have no idea what I’m doing that’s illegal. The offending character is supposed to match any number of whitespace characters between the final section and the {.

Can anyone spot what I’m doing wrong?

Answer 1

You need to escape the { with \\.