Thread: Question to Pattern.matches and escape sequences

Hello,
I have a question regarding regular expressions and the Pattern.matches function. Right now I'm experimenting around a bit and found a strange behaviour I can't explain. Maybe some of you can.
Let's say we have:

String s= "abc\nabc";
System.out.println(Pattern.matches("abc\nabc", s));
System.out.println(Pattern.matches("abc\\nabc", s));
System.out.println(Pattern.matches("abc\\\nabc", s));

Why do all three matches yield true?
For the second one it's clear, since \n is a regex-expression and the first backslash quotes it. But the rest is not so clear, especially the third one. Can someone explain it to me?

Ok, thank you. I thought that this is something obvious and I'm just to blind to see it