searching string for '\'

Tyrrial

hi,
just need to search a string for the character '\'. it's a reserved char and it's giving me hassle
can someone tell me how i can get over this.
thanks

mp3guy

I think if you put it in as "\"

lynchie

Tyrrial wrote:

hi,
just need to search a string for the character '\'. it's a reserved char and it's giving me hassle
can someone tell me how i can get over this.
thanks

What Language? In Java, the backslash is an escape character, so you need to use \\ instead.

Tyrrial

java indeed,
thanks, '\\' seems to have worked

Slaanesh

Hey Niall,

What Lynchie said is fine for searching but you could run into some troubles when using regular expressions.

	String t = "Hello how \\ are you? \\ ";
	for(int i = 0; i <t.length(); i++)
	{
		if(t.charAt(i) == '\\')
		{
			System.out.println("\\ found");
		}

	}
	t = t.replaceAll("\\\\",".");
	System.out.println(t);

The above example 2 backslashes in the string as expected.

In order to replace the slahes with periods we need to use 4 slashes in the regex in order to find them. I can't remember the reason for this but if you look up regular expressions I'm sure that will explain it. Someone else will probably explain it better than me though

Seth Brundle

isn't it because to escape a slash you use a slash and do this twice for each of the slashes in your search?