Escaping spaces in a Properties file in Java

Writing by shivdev on Monday, 5 of December , 2011 at 6:25 pm

Problem 1:

Can you escape keys or values in a properties file? Yes. Use backslash \ as the escape character.
So Hello World=foo should be written as Hello\ World=foo
Wikipedia has an excellent article

Problem 2:

You might most probably use the String replaceAll(String regex, String replacement) method. So how do you escape spaces?

// This Will NOT WORK !!
String escaped = “Hello World”.replaceAll(” “, “\\ “);

// This is the right way to do it, since we need to work with regex
String escaped = “Hello World”.replaceAll(“\\s”, “\\\\ “);

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Category: Java

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