Enables literal parsing of the pattern. In this, all the characters including escape sequences and, meta-characters don’t have any special meaning they are treated as literal characters.
For example, normally if you search for the regular expression “^This” in the given input text it matches the lines starting with the word "This".
Example
import java.util.regex.Matcher;
import java.util.regex.Pattern;
public class LTERAL_Example {
public static void main(String[] args) {
String input = "This is the first line\n"
+ "This is the second line\n"
+ "^This is the third line";
//Regular expression to accept date in MM-DD-YYY format
String regex = "^This";
//Creating a Pattern object
Pattern pattern = Pattern.compile(regex,Pattern.LITERAL);
//Creating a Matcher object
Matcher matcher = pattern.matcher(input);
int count = 0;
while(matcher.find()) {
count++;
System.out.println(matcher.group());
}
System.out.println("Number of matches: "+count);
}
}Output
^This Number of matches: 1
In literal mode, the metacharacter “^” has no meaning and the regular expression “^This” matches the exact word.
Example
import java.util.regex.Matcher;
import java.util.regex.Pattern;
public class LTERAL_Example {
public static void main(String[] args) {
String input = "This is the first line\n"
+ "This is the second line\n"
+ "^This is the third line";
//Regular expression to accept date in MM-DD-YYY format
String regex = "^This";
//Creating a Pattern object
Pattern pattern = Pattern.compile(regex,Pattern.LITERAL);
System.out.println("Usually it is printed as: \n"+input);
//Creating a Matcher object
Matcher matcher = pattern.matcher(input);
int count = 0;
while(matcher.find()) {
count++;
System.out.println(matcher.group());
}
System.out.println("Number of matches: "+count);
}
}Output
Usually it is printed as: This is the first line This is the second line ^This is the third line ^This Number of matches: 1