Matching parentheses with a RowFilter (regexFilter)

Question

protected void searchFilter(String s, int n) 
{
        RowFilter<MyTableModel, Object> rf = null;
        try {
            System.out.println(s);
            rf = RowFilter.regexFilter(s, n);
        } catch (PatternSyntaxException e) {
            System.out.println(e);
        }
        filters.add(rf);
    }

I am trying to match a string in a JTable, that contains parentheses. In the above code, the string parameter could be: John (Smith)

And the column i'm searching in:

Jane (Doe)
John (Smith)
John (Smith)
Jack (Smith)

Where I want it to return:

John (Smith)
John (Smith)

But right now it doesn't return anything. I have looked at the documentation for Matcher, Pattern and RowFilter, but nothing has helped me so far.

Answer 1

Parentheses are meta-characters in regular expressions. Hence you are actually trying to match John Smith (without parentheses). What you need to do is to escape them.

Java has a built-in function to escape all meta-characters automatically: Pattern.quote. Run s through this function and it should fix it.

Also note that you might want to surround the pattern with ^...$. Otherwise it would accept rows containing something like This is John (Smith) foobar. (because the regex is glad if it can match a substring of the input).