groovy: how to escape "(" regex etc in textarea?

Question

I have some text area field in my grails application. I got the following errors:

.PatternSyntaxException: Unmatched closing ')' near index 36 Name: note: 1) data listing ....

how could i escape the regular expressions in the text area field?

thanks.

Answer 1

The same as in a literal: place a backslash before it:

\(

EDIT: But if none of the characters from the text area must be treated special, try:

String escapedContents = java.util.regex.Pattern.quote(textArea.getText());