Thanks Charles! It did occured to me at one point. But I did not give it a try, because I thought the Java's escape sequence is different from the pattern meta char set. Stupid me.
I tried to match a . (dot), which is a meta character. But the following did not compile because \. is not a valid escape sequence. java.util.regex.Pattern.compile("[0-9]*\."); Any get-around? Thx.