Question

This doesn't seem to work.
String stuff = "System.out.println("This is a string")";
System.out.print(stuff);

note, I am NOT trying to print what the inside println is calling. I'm actually looking to print out THIS actual statement to the screen.

System.out.println("this is a string");


I don't want this string to be evaluated as a method call. I want to literally print this statement.

Answer 1

I'm using this so that I can test regex to look for valid names in a java document.
and I'm trying to make my regex ignore all words inside of quotation marks and words inside of comments.

Answer 2

Hyroko,

The parser gets a bit confused when you have quotes within quotes - to get quotes inside of a String, you have to place a special character before it called an escape character. In java, I think it's a backslash: \

```
String stuff = "System.out.println(\"This is a string\")";
System.out.print(stuff);
```
that should work.

Here are the other characters that can be 'escaped' in java: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1367322/what-are-all-the-escape-characters-in-java

Answer 3

Thank you, yes, that worked.

Answer 4

I'm working on making hash tables to hash all reserved words into one table, and all legal java names into another, whilst ignoring comments and strings.

Answer 5

Sounds like a fun program, good luck with it man

Answer 6

yeah, final project of the semester. relatively easy, just thinking about the Regex

Answer 7

Thank you