i'm probably doing something very dumb here (trying to match a literal dollar followed by chars in a string)...

println("Hello \$name".contains(Regex("[a-zA-Z0-9]+"))) // true
println("Hello \$name".contains(Regex("\$[a-zA-Z0-9]+"))) // false

have to escape the dollar in the string literal or Kotlin will treat it as a reference and have to escape the dollar in the pattern or that means end of string

What you use

\\$

or

[$]

instead of

\$

?

ah both of those work fine. thanks

even better: use

Regex("""\$\w+""")

because you don't have to double the

\

in raw string lterals