use \\:
instead of \:
.. the \
has special meaning in java strings.
Colon does not have special meaning in a character class and does not need to be escaped. According to the PHP regex docs, the only characters that need to be escaped in a character class are the following:
All non-alphanumeric characters other than
\
,-
,^
(at the start) and the terminating]
are non-special in character classes, but it does no harm if they are escaped.
For more info about Java regular expressions, see the docs.
Be careful, -
has a special meaning with regexp. In a []
, you can put it without problem if it is placed at the end. In your case, ,-:
is taken as from ,
to :
.
Source: Stackoverflow.com