How to escape text for regular expression in Java

Since Java 1.5, yes:

Pattern.quote("$5");

It may be too late to respond, but you can also use Pattern.LITERAL, which would ignore all special characters while formatting:

Pattern.compile(textToFormat, Pattern.LITERAL);

Difference between Pattern.quote and Matcher.quoteReplacement was not clear to me before I saw following example

s.replaceFirst(Pattern.quote("text to replace"), 
               Matcher.quoteReplacement("replacement text"));