Inspectopedia 2025.2 Help

Suspicious regex expression argument

Reports calls to String.replaceAll() or String.split() where the first argument is a single regex meta character argument.

The regex meta characters are one of .$|()[{^?*+\. They have a special meaning in regular expressions. For example, calling "ab.cd".replaceAll(".", "-") produces "-----", because the dot matches any character. Most likely the escaped variant "\\." was intended instead.

Using File.separator as a regex is also reported. The File.separator has a platform specific value. It equals to / on Linux and Mac but equals to \ on Windows, which is not a valid regular expression, so such code is not portable.

Example:

s.replaceAll(".", "-");

After the quick-fix is applied:

s.replaceAll("\\.", "-");

Locating this inspection

By ID

Can be used to locate inspection in e.g. Qodana configuration files, where you can quickly enable or disable it, or adjust its settings.

ReplaceAllDot
Via Settings dialog

Path to the inspection settings via IntelliJ Platform IDE Settings dialog, when you need to adjust inspection settings directly from your IDE.

Settings or Preferences | Editor | Inspections | Java | Probable bugs

Suppressing Inspection

You can suppress this inspection by placing the following comment marker before the code fragment where you no longer want messages from this inspection to appear:

//noinspection ReplaceAllDot

More detailed instructions as well as other ways and options that you have can be found in the product documentation:

Inspection Details

By default bundled with:

IntelliJ IDEA 2025.2, Qodana for JVM 2025.2,

Last modified: 18 September 2025