how can i escape a group of special characters in java in one method?

Question

i use lucene search but lucene has a bunch of special characters to escape like:

- && || ! ( ) { } [ ] ^ \" ~ * ? : \\

i am havin

Answer 1

Use regular expression. String.replaceAll() supports regular expression, so you can solve this problem using one single call. Just be careful: some of these characters are special for regular expressions too, so they mus be escaped "twice":

str.replaceAll("([-\\&\\|!\\(\\)\\{\\}\\[\\]\\^\\"~\\*\\?:\\])", "\\$1");

(I have not tried this, probably this line needs some fixes, but this is the idea)