Why is that a thing in Kotlin? ```val url = "<https://google.com/>" val rgxReplace = url.replace("/"...

# announcements

[gabrielfv]

Why is that a thing in Kotlin?

val url = "<https://google.com/>"
val rgxReplace = url.replace("/".toRegex(), "\\/")
val strReplace = url.replace("/", "\\/")
    
println(rgxReplace)  // outputs: <https://google.com/>
println(strReplace)  // outputs: https:\/\/google.com\/

[gabrielfv]

In the regex example I should replace with "\\\\/" to get a similar result

[Ruckus]

You have to deal with 2 levels of character escaping: 1 for the string literal, and 1 for the regex.

[gabrielfv]

So it expects the replacing to also be a regex? In what use case would that be a thing?

[gabrielfv]

Another thing, I'm writing something like that to implement escaping for the / character in Gson serialization. My backend needs that, although I'm slightly concerned about possible side effects like breaking Base64.

[Ruckus]

To get a literal \ in regex, you need to escape it: \\. To get a literal \\ in a Kotlin string, you need to escape both: \\\\.

[Volodymyr Galandzij]

@gabrielfv You can use raw-strings to avoid double-escaping:
https://kotlinlang.org/docs/reference/basic-types.html#string-literals

url.replace("/".toRegex(), """\\/""")