Special chars in regular expressions - Problems

[Alan]

I am trying to match (for removal) certain characters from a file,
using regular expressions (java.util.regex.*). However, the Java 1.6
compiler does not like any of the characters that are preceded by the
backslash ("/"), although the Java SE 6.0 API documentation for
java.util.regex
Class Pattern says it`s OK. The code may be found below.

For the line of code

String patternStr = "[\d\p{Space}\p{Punct}\p{Blank}]+";

it says that each of the characters after the slashes (d and p) is an
"illegal escape character." I understood the brackets [...] to mean
match any of the characters enclosed by them.

Is it obvious to anyone what I am doing wrong? Thanks, Alan

import java.net.*;
import java.io.*;
import java.util.regex.*;

public class CleanTokens
{
public static void main ( String[] args ) throws IOException
{
try
{
BufferedReader infile = new BufferedReader(new
FileReader("input.txt"));

PrintWriter outfile = new PrintWriter(new
FileOutputStream("output.txt"));

String inputStr = "";

// Define regular expression pattern
String patternStr = "[\d\p{Space}\p{Punct}\p{Blank}]+";

// Compile regular expression
Pattern pattern = Pattern.compile(patternStr);

// Define matcher object
Matcher matcher = pattern.matcher(str);

// Define replacement string (nothing --- will delete pattern)
String replacementStr = "";

while ((inputStr = infile.readLine()) != null)
{
// Take the current string
matcher.reset(inputStr);

// Remove the characters that match the pattern
inputStr = matcher.replaceAll(replacementStr);

// Write out the modified string
outfile.println(str);
}

infile.close();

outfile.close();
}

catch (IOException e) {e.printStackTrace();}
}
}

 

[Alan]

Never mind! I had to double the backslashes ("\\") in the expression
as follows. Alan

String patternStr = "[\\d\\p{Space}\\p{Punct}\\p{Blank}]+";