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 to replace those characters in one go.

example:

 String s="some text && || []!{} ()^*?~ and ";
        Pattern p= Pattern.compile("([-&\\|!\\(\\){}\\[\\]\\^\"\\~\\*\\?:\\\\])");

        s=p.matcher(s).replaceAll("\\\\$1");
        System.out.println(s);\\prints some text \&\& \|\| \[\]\!\{\} \(\)\^\*\?\~ and 

Answer 2

There is also a method called QueryParser#escape, which may be useful:

Returns a String where those characters that QueryParser expects to be escaped are escaped by a preceding \.

Answer 3

There is a Apache Commons Library for that: http://commons.apache.org/proper/commons-lang/javadocs/api-2.6/org/apache/commons/lang/StringEscapeUtils.html

Answer 4

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)