Splitting Strings in Java is easy, because there is a split() method implemented in the class String, which means every string object can be split with a pattern provided. Here is an example:
String text = "One;Two;Three";
//Splitting the text on semi-colons
//Note that an array of String is returned.
String[] tokens = text.split(";");
//Loop over the array to display the result.
for (String token : tokens){
System.out.println(token);
}
One
Two
Three
Since the split() function accepts regular expression as the parameter, if you want to split on, for example, a backslash "|", then you need to escape it.
String text = "One|Two|Three";
//Splitting the text on backslashes
//Note that there are 2 '\'.
String[] tokens = text.split("\\|");
//Loop over the array to display the result.
for (String token : tokens){
System.out.println(token);
}
One
Two
Three
Most of the time, split() is used to break well formatted messages. For example, "One|Two|Three" is well formatted with values in-between every backslash. What if the message is like this: "One||Three"?
String text = "One||Three";
String[] tokens = text.split("\\|");
for (String token : tokens){
System.out.println(token);
}
One
Three
In this example, you can see that the text was split into {"One", "", "Three"}. If you want the result to be {"One", "Three"}, you need to modify the regular expression.
String text = "One||Three";
String[] tokens = text.split("[\\|]+");
for (String token : tokens){
System.out.println(token);
}
One
Three
As you can see, if you are familiar with regular expressions, split() is a very useful tool to split texts with complicated patterns.
