pattern matching

the pattern does not get matched if the url contains " ? " why so ?

what is the solution to this problem

The "?" has special meaning in regular expressions. You need to escape it by putting a "\" before it. (really two because the \ is a special character in Java and needs escaping itself.)

In the regular expression world, ? means 0 or 1 of the previous character.

import java.io.*;
import java.util.*;
import java.sql.*;
import java.util.regex.*;

class pattern
{
public static void main(String[] args)
{
String temp="http://railsforum.com/viewtopic.php\\?id=38039";
String par="http://railsforum.com/viewtopic.php\\?id=38039";
Pattern pat= Pattern.compile(par);
Matcher mat= pat.matcher(temp);

if(mat.find())
{
System.out.println("match found");

}
}
}

it is still not be able match the pattern

i got the answer..
import java.io.*;
import java.util.*;
import java.sql.*;
import java.util.regex.*;

class pattern
{
public static void main(String[] args)
{
String temp="http://railsforum.com/viewtopic.php?id=38039";
String par="http://railsforum.com/viewtopic.php\\?id=38039";
Pattern pat= Pattern.compile(par);
Matcher mat= pat.matcher(temp);

if(mat.find())
{
System.out.println("match found");

}
}
}