[#GROOVY-2991] It looks like there's no way to escape $ character in the regexp string

groovy

It looks like there's no way to escape $ character in the regexp string

Created: 08/Aug/08 03:44 AM Updated: 22/Oct/08 10:19 AM

Component/s:

regular expressions

Affects Version/s:

1.5.6

Fix Version/s:

1.7-beta-1

Time Tracking:

Not Specified

Description

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Logically, $ character in the regexp string should be escaped by two backslashes, one for preventing GString property lookup, and another to escape regexp's special meaning of $. But it doesn't seem to work with Groovy 1.5.6:

groovy> println 'Hi, $aaa'.replaceAll(/
$aaa/, 'Sergey')

Exception thrown: groovy.lang.MissingPropertyException: No such property: aaa for class: Script5
groovy.lang.MissingPropertyException: No such property: aaa for class: Script5
at Script5.run(Script5:1)

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Peter Ledbrook added a comment - 08/Aug/08 03:54 AM

Note that:

println 'Hi, $aaa'.replaceAll("\\\$aaa", 'Sergey')

works, so it's something specific to the slash form of strings.

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Jochen Theodorou added a comment - 08/Aug/08 04:47 AM

Paul, what should we do about this?

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Paul King added a comment - 08/Aug/08 09:51 PM

Yes, at the moment you have to do either one of these:

println 'Hi, $aaa'.replaceAll(/\${'$'}aaa/, 'Sergey')
println 'Hi, $aaa'.replaceAll(/\$${''}aaa/, 'Sergey')

I think the solution is to change how we do escaping for slashy strings.
This is a breaking change but an incremental path has been suggested:
http://docs.codehaus.org/display/GroovyJSR/Groovy+String+Handling
under 'Slashy String improvement Proposal'. I guess it needs further discussion.

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Paul King added a comment - 28/Aug/08 08:51 PM

Sergey, are the suggested workarounds good enough for you for 1.5.7? If so, I will change the fix version to 1.6.

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Sergey Nebolsin added a comment - 29/Aug/08 02:05 AM

Sure, Paul