java - Escape ( in regular expression

Question

Im searching for the regular expression - ".(conflicted copy.". I wrote the following code for this

String str = "12B - (conflicted copy 2013-11-16-11-07-12)";
boolean matches = str.matches(".*(conflicted.*");
System.out.println(matches);

But I get the exception

Exception in thread "main" java.util.regex.PatternSyntaxException: Unclosed group near index 15 .(conflicted.

I understand that the compiler thinks that ( is the beginning of a pattern group. I tried to escape ( by adding ( but that doesnt work.

Can someone tell me how to escape ( here ?

Answer 1

Escaping is done by . In Java, is written as \¹, so you should escaping the ( would be \(.

Side note: It's good to have a look at Pattern#quote that returns a literal pattern String. In your case, it's not that helpful since you don't want to escape all special-characters.

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¹ Because a character preceded by a backslash () is an escape sequence and has special meaning to the compiler.