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Split a string in Java

Split a string in Java

February 1, 2007 Java 2 Comments

Split a string in Java

Split method in String class will break a string into tokens or array. By specify regular expression as delimiters, as the example below.Split a string into array, using a space as delimiter.

String str = "This is a test string";
String[] words = str.split(" ");
for (int i=0; i < words.length; i++)
  System.out.println(words[i]);
Output:
This
is
a
test
string

In some case that delimiter has a special meaning in a regular expression. You must add two backslashes (\\..) in front of the delimiter to make it as a character rather than the wildcard in a regular expression. Some examples of delimiter that has a special meaning are a dot(.), a star(*) , ‘|’ etc.

For a dot, must use delimiter as “\\.”

String str = "123.456.789.10.11";
String[] words = str2.split ("\\.");
for (int i=0; i < words.length; i++)
  System.out.println(words[i]);

The special character needs to be escaped with a “\” but since “\” is also a special character in Java, you need to escape it again with another.

2 Comments

  1. Nico van der Heide September 26, 2007

    Ehm if you are going to use String alteration methods and such… and more then once you could probably better use

    StringUtils from
    http://commons.apache.org/lang/

  2. Edson Pessotti October 21, 2016

    String[] podes;
    for (String pode1 : TC1.split(“,”)) {
    JTse.setText(pode1) ;
    }

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