How to replace " \ " with " \\ " in java

Question

I tried to break the string into arrays and replace \ with \\ , but couldn't do it, also I tried String.replaceAll something like this ("\","\\");.

I want to supply a path to JNI and it reads only in this way.

score 34 · Accepted Answer · answered Sep 23 '11 at 22:04

34

Don't use String.replaceAll in this case - that's specified in terms of regular expressions, which means you'd need even more escaping. This should be fine:

String escaped = original.replace("\\", "\\\\");

Note that the backslashes are doubled due to being in Java string literals - so the actual strings involved here are "single backslash" and "double backslash" - not double and quadruple.

replace works on simple strings - no regexes involved.

answered Sep 23 '11 at 22:04

Jon Skeet

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This adds four slashes like this \\\\ for me – James andresakis Nov 05 '13 at 20:53
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@Jamesandresakis: It's hard to tell what you're doing wrong with so little information. My guess is that you're looking at the string in a debugger, where it may be escaping it for you. – Jon Skeet Nov 05 '13 at 21:01

score 2 · Answer 2 · edited Sep 25 '15 at 12:50

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You could use replaceAll:

String escaped = original.replaceAll("\\\\", "\\\\\\\\");

edited Sep 25 '15 at 12:50

Pshemo

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answered Sep 24 '12 at 11:54

Bibin Mathew

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score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Sep 24 '11 at 02:30

I want to supply a path to JNI and it reads only in this way.

That's not right. You only need double backslashes in literal strings that you declare in a programming language. You never have to do this substitution at runtime. You need to rethink why you're doing this.

score 0 · Answer 4 · edited Apr 28 '20 at 14:03

It can be quite an adventure to deal with the "\" since it is considered as an escape character in Java. You always need to "\" a "\" in a String. But the fun begins when you want to use a "\" in regex expression, because the "\" is an escape character in regex too. So for a single "\" you need to use "\\" in a regex expression.

here is the link where i found this information: https://www.rgagnon.com/javadetails/java-0476.html

I had to convert '\' to '\\'. I found somewhere that we can use:

filepathtext = filepathtext.replace("\\","\\\\");

and it works. Given below is the image of how I implemented it.

https://i.stack.imgur.com/LVjk6.png

How to replace " \ " with " \\ " in java

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