Regular expressions read from a file?

Question

Hello,
I'm trying to read a bunch of string literals from a file, and then replace their appearances in another string. It works, except when I have special characters in the file, like this:
(hello)
When I use that in Pattern.compile(), it obviously thinks that the parenthesis are not literal. So, I edited my text file and changed the line to:
\\(hello\\)
No change. It will not match the string at all. I've even tried this (just out of deperation):
\\\\(hello\\\\)
It just doesn't seem I can escape it right if the expression is being read from a file.
What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

Another idea: I tried the following
import java.io.*;
public class RegexTest {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        try {
            File input = new File("pattern.txt");
            FileReader in = new FileReader(input);
            int c;
            StringBuffer buf = new StringBuffer();
            try {
                c = in.read();
                while (c != -1) {
                    if (!Character.isWhitespace((char)c)) {
                        buf.append((char) c);
                    c = in.read();
                System.out.println(buf.toString());
            } catch (IOException iox) {}
            String previous = "(hello) test test test";
            System.out.println(previous);
            System.out.println(previous.replaceAll(buf.toString(), "test"));
     } catch (FileNotFoundException nfnx) {}
}and it works properly.
I found out that if the input line with the "\(hello\)" pattern ends with the usual CRLF the only way to have the expected results is to filter out the extra characters (using the !Character.isWhitespace((char)c) test).
Does this give you any help?