Java: regular expressions.Create reg to validate path to file

Question

I need to create regular expression that would validate path to file. It should approve such strings like:

c:\
c:\dir1\file.txt
c:\dir1\dir2\file.txt

and so on. I tried to create it.Result:

(c|C):(\\\w{0,8})*(\.\w{1,3})?

In gskinner everything OK, but when I compile this pattern in Java none of the previous rows are not tested.

Java code:

p = Pattern.compile("(c|C):(\\\w{0,8})*");
m = p.matcher(arguments);
result = m.matches();

Answer 1

I just edited your example code to work:

String regex = "[cC]:(?:\\\\\\w{0,8})*(?:[.]\\w{1,3})?"

The regular expression \\\\ matches a single backslash since \\ is a special character in regex, and hence must be escaped, but once we put this in quotes, aka turn it into a String , we need to escape each of the backslashes, yielding "\\\\\\\\" . We need the additional two \\\\ for w .