Special chars in regular expressions - Problems

From:
 Alan <jalanthomas@verizon.net>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.java.programmer
Date:
Sat, 06 Oct 2007 01:32:20 -0000
Message-ID:
<1191634340.408810.73280@o80g2000hse.googlegroups.com>
    I am trying to match (for removal) certain characters from a file,
using regular expressions (java.util.regex.*). However, the Java 1.6
compiler does not like any of the characters that are preceded by the
backslash ("/"), although the Java SE 6.0 API documentation for
java.util.regex
Class Pattern says it`s OK. The code may be found below.

    For the line of code

String patternStr = "[\d\p{Space}\p{Punct}\p{Blank}]+";

it says that each of the characters after the slashes (d and p) is an
"illegal escape character." I understood the brackets [...] to mean
match any of the characters enclosed by them.

    Is it obvious to anyone what I am doing wrong? Thanks, Alan

import java.net.*;
import java.io.*;
import java.util.regex.*;

public class CleanTokens
{
   public static void main ( String[] args ) throws IOException
   {
      try
      {
         BufferedReader infile = new BufferedReader(new
FileReader("input.txt"));

         PrintWriter outfile = new PrintWriter(new
FileOutputStream("output.txt"));

     String inputStr = "";

     // Define regular expression pattern
     String patternStr = "[\d\p{Space}\p{Punct}\p{Blank}]+";

     // Compile regular expression
     Pattern pattern = Pattern.compile(patternStr);

     // Define matcher object
  Matcher matcher = pattern.matcher(str);

     // Define replacement string (nothing --- will delete pattern)
     String replacementStr = "";

         while ((inputStr = infile.readLine()) != null)
         {
        // Take the current string
        matcher.reset(inputStr);

        // Remove the characters that match the pattern
        inputStr = matcher.replaceAll(replacementStr);

        // Write out the modified string
            outfile.println(str);
         }

         infile.close();

         outfile.close();
      }

      catch (IOException e) {e.printStackTrace();}
   }
}

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