llegal escape character followed by a space

Question

I\'m writing a bit of code to run a shell script using process that loads and runs a file in terminal. The problem I\'m having is getting the filename to be recognised by termin

Answer 1

If you want the string to contain an actual backslash you need to escape the backslash. Otherwise javac thinks you're trying to escape space, which doesn't need escaping:

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

Using this code, the second argument to the method will be a 2-character string: backslash followed by space. I assume that's what you want.

See section 3.10.6 of the Java Language Specification for more details of character/string literal escape sequences.

Answer 2

If you want to put the \ character (which is the escape character) inside a string, you'll need to escape it:

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

A single \ is a escape sequence leading character, such as with \n (newline) or \r (carriage return). The full list of single-character escapes is:

\b    backspace
\t    tab
\n    linefeed (newline)
\f    form feed
\r    carriage return
\"    double quote
\'    single quote
\\    backslash

This is in addition to the octal escape sequences s such as \0, \12 or \377.

The reason why your separatorChar solution won't work is because that gives you the separator char (/ under UNIX and its brethren), not the escape character \ that you need.