Regular expression for detecting round brackets

Question

I have a large array with string. Now, I need to use the string in the array to form patterns. However for the string with round brackets, the constructed patterns don\'t work.

Answer 1

It should definitely work well... if you test against a matching String :)

Your problem is that "Student (male): John" starts with an uppercase S, and you're trying to match a lowercase s. That's as simple as it gets!

Note that you may use [()] to match either ( or ):

p = p.replaceAll("[()]", "\\\\$0");

By the way, I would also point out that you could replace the lines:

p = p.replaceAll("\\(", "\\\\(");
p = p.replaceAll("\\)", "\\\\)");

Simply by using:

p = Pattern.quote(p);

Cheers!