String problem: Not being able to escape a parenthesis for a possible regex

Question

So, I have barely any clue how to operate regular expressions except for a little bit of knowledge of it in PHP.
What I'm trying to do is to separate the first part of a string from a qualifier, so I need a regular expression since I would ideally like to be able . The problem I'm having is that my attempt at the separation isn't working. I've tried doing what I think the Pattern or Matcher class does, I've tried using String.split, and I've tried using the regular String.replace method. What I'm trying to do is illustrated (I hope) in the following SSCCE:
public class SSCCE
    public static void main(final String args[])
        final String testString = "I want to keep this sentence. (I wish to "+
            "discard this sentence and the space in between the sentences.)";
        final String testExtract = testString.replace(" \(.+\)","");
        System.out.println(testExtract);
}From my understanding, parentheses are supposed to be a wild card of sorts, so they would need to be escaped in order to be taken as literals, which means that line 7 is supposed to match any of the characters inside the parentheses when the opening one is preceeded by a space and then delete them. The problem I'm having is that escaping the parentheses produces an error, and not escaping them produces the original string. So I'm not sure how to tell Java that I'm actually using literal parentheses.
I already tried configuring my error preferences to ignore everything it could, but that didn't work.
I don't know if it matters, but I'm using Java 1.6 and Eclipse for PHP 1.3.2.20110218-0812.

Answer 1

ElectrifiedBrain wrote:
OK, that fixed it, but what would you recommend instead of ".+"? I don't know what a "reluctant modifier" is.The constructs ".+" and ".*" are 'greedy' in that they initially they capture as much as they can which fundamentally means that, depending on other options, they move forwards until the end of your string. If the regular expression is not satisfied at this point, backtracking is needed until the regex can never match or until a match is obtained. To overcome this one make the ".+" or ".*" reluctant to capture by use of a "?" i.e. ".+?" and ".*?" . Check the Javadoc for class java.util.regex.Pattern.