Name: rmT116609 Date: 08/26/2004


A DESCRIPTION OF THE REQUEST :
The intention of this proposed change is to make writing regular expressions more straightforward and more Perl-like. Writing a regular expression in Java is, besides thinking about logic, also about adding a lot of backslashes.

Instead of the double quote I suggest to use the back quote (what's in a name), and also a RegexString object that extends the String object.
Examples:
"\\(.*?\\)" .equals(`\(.*?\)`);
`\(hello\)`.equals("\\(hello\\)");
Pattern p = Pattern.compile(`\s+\d+`);

JUSTIFICATION :
Although escaping special characters with a backslash is in the Java Language Specification, the result is that regular expressions become less readable and maintainable. To get rid of the extra backslashes I suggest to create this new String-like object that handles backslashes more gracefully.
(Incident Review ID: 237231)
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