How to type colon in regexp

Question

colon   has a special meaning in regexp  but I need to use it as is  like  A-Za-z0-9  -     I have tried to escape it  but this does not work  A-Za-z0-9  -

User · Answer

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.

User · Answer

use     instead of      the   has special meaning in java strings

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

In most regex implementations  including Java s     has no special meaning  neither inside nor outside a character class   Your problem is most likely due to the fact the - acts as a range operator in your class    A-Za-z0-9  -      where  -  matches all ascii characters between     and      Note that it still matches the literal     however   Try this instead    A-Za-z0-9   -     By placing - at the start or the end of the class  it matches the literal  -   As mentioned in the comments by Keoki Zee  you can also escape the - inside the class  but most people simply add it at the end   A demo   public class Test       public static void main String   args            System out println  8   matches    -                true   8  is in the range                  System out println  8   matches     -               false   8  does not match     or     or  -          System out println    -      matches     -          true  all chars match     or     or  -

[java] How to type ":" ("colon") in regexp?

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