异常消息可以包含Java中的正则表达式字符吗？

Question

I'm throwing a new exception in a Java class with some characters that usually get used for regular expressions.

 throw new Exception("(): Fake timeout for message(.*XYZV.* fakeApp .*).");

Is this Ok? Or do I need to escape them?

Answer 1

You need to escape special regex characters only in places where your string is treated like a regular expression. For example, replaceAll treats its first parameter like a regex, so you would need to escape metacharacters that you want to be interpreted like plain characters.

Generally speaking, there is no such interpretation in the message passed to the constructor of the Exception class, so there is no need to escape such characters.

However, you may have a custom tool for log analysis, which might be interpreting parts of messages as regular expressions. In this case the answer depends on what you do with the custom tool, because by the time the interpretation of the message as a regex (or anything else for that matter) is happening, Java libraries are completely out of the loop.