Java 11 and 12 – New Features

Strings and regex patterns, another hell

This section will provide another example of escaping sequence hell—defining regex patterns as Java strings.

To remove whitespaces (spaces or tabs) between a word character and a period (.), you'll need the following regex (regular expression) pattern:

(\w)(\s+))[\.] 

To store it using a Java string, you'll need the following code:

String patternToMatch = "(\\w)(\\s+)([\\.,])";     // Isn't that a lot                                                    // to digest? 
                                                   // Does the regex                                                     // pattern has
                                                   // a single                                                    // backslash, or,                                                   // two of them? 

I'll share a quick secret here—when I started working with Java, one of my biggest nightmares was defining patterns as string values. I admit it; I had a difficulty writing patterns, and using the \ escape character ...