Regular expression to match a backslash followed by a quote

by

If you don’t need any of regex mechanisms like predefined character classes \d, quantifiers etc. instead of replaceAll which expects regex use replace which expects literals

str = str.replace("\\\"","\"");

Both methods will replace all occurrences of targets, but replace will treat targets literally.

BUT if you really must use regex you are looking for

str = str.replaceAll("\\\\\"", "\"")

\ is special character in regex (used for instance to create \d – character class representing digits). To make regex treat \ as normal character you need to place another \ before it to turn off its special meaning (you need to escape it). So regex which we are trying to create is \\.

But to create string literal representing text \\ so you could pass it to regex engine you need to write it as four \ ("\\\\"), because \ is also special character in String literals (part of code written using "...") since it can be used for instance as \t to represent tabulator.
That is why you also need to escape \ there.

In short you need to escape \ twice:

  • in regex \\
  • and then in String literal "\\\\"

More Related Contents:

  1. What do the characters ((?:(?:(?: mean in pattern-matching? [duplicate]
  2. How to split a string if any chracter is found in java
  3. Java: splitting a comma-separated string but ignoring commas in quotes
  4. Split string with dot as delimiter
  5. Use String.split() with multiple delimiters
  6. Java how to replace 2 or more spaces with single space in string and delete leading and trailing spaces
  7. Java Regex Capturing Groups
  8. SCJP6 regex issue
  9. Get the index of a pattern in a string using regex
  10. Regular expression for excluding special characters [closed]
  11. How to determine if a number is a prime with regex?
  12. Java regex to extract text between tags
  13. Java regex: Repeating capturing groups
  14. Java regex – overlapping matches
  15. Generic support for ISO 8601 format in Java 6
  16. Find everything between two XML tags with RegEx
  17. Parsing CSV input with a RegEx in java
  18. simple java regex throwing illegalstateexception [duplicate]
  19. Range of valid character for a base 64 encoding
  20. Regex: ?: notation (Question mark and colon notation) [duplicate]
  21. Whats the difference between \z and \Z in a regular expression and when and how do I use it?
  22. Regex reuse a pattern to capture multiple groups?
  23. Regex for checking if a string is strictly alphanumeric
  24. Java Regex pattern that matches in any online tester but doesn’t in Eclipse
  25. Java Pattern Matcher: create new or reset?
  26. How can split a string which contains only delimiter?
  27. Regular expression to get an attribute from HTML tag
  28. Issue with Java Regex \b
  29. Java’s Scanner vs String.split() vs StringTokenizer; which should I use?
  30. java regex pattern unclosed character class

Leave a Comment