title: PatternSyntaxException being thrown with String.matches()?
body: <p>I'm writing an assembler program that analyzes assembly code and generates object code. However, I'm having some issues with one of the regex functions. I have had no experience with java regular expressions, so I'm not quite sure what I am doing to cause this exception. Below is the function that is throwing the exception. THe first operand being evaluated is "0", which should of course evaluate to false.</p>
  
  <pre><code>//Returns true if operand is a Symbol, false otherwise.
  public boolean isSymbol(String operand){
      if(!operand.equals("")){
          if(((operand.matches("[a-zA-Z]*"))&amp;&amp;
                  (!operand.matches(".'"))) ||(operand.matches("*"))){ //Exception
              return true;
          }
          else return false;
      }
      return false;
  }
  </code></pre>