Fixed in CVS, and you can download a new pmd-3.4.jar file here: http://infoether.com/~tom/pmd-3.4.jar that contains that fix. Note that we've recently added a dependency on jakarta-oro to support regular expressions in XPath expressions; you can get that here: http://infoether.com/~tom/jakarta-oro-2.0.8.jar Thanks, Tom Support PMD, get the book: http://pmdapplied.com/