How do you escape regex strings in Freemarker

Question

I am using the matches string builtin and need to run a regex pattern

(Views:).*?(span>)(.*?)(<\/div)

However, Freemarker freaks out because of the ">" character which is a special character in Freemarker. Any ideas how to get round this?

Answer 1

Use \l for < and \g for >.

Taken from a FreeMarker documentation page which was second item in a Google search for "freemarker escape string".

Oh and be careful trying to parse HTML with regex - with uncontrolled markup it turns difficult very quickly.