How to split a string, but also keep the delimiters?

Question

You can use lookahead and lookbehind, which are features of regular expressions.

System.out.println(Arrays.toString("a;b;c;d".split("(?<=;)")));
System.out.println(Arrays.toString("a;b;c;d".split("(?=;)")));
System.out.println(Arrays.toString("a;b;c;d".split("((?<=;)|(?=;))")));

And you will get:

[a;, b;, c;, d]
[a, ;b, ;c, ;d]
[a, ;, b, ;, c, ;, d]

The last one is what you want.

((?<=;)|(?=;)) equals to select an empty character before ; or after ;.

EDIT: Fabian Steeg's comments on readability is valid. Readability is always a problem with regular expressions. One thing I do to make regular expressions more readable is to create a variable, the name of which represents what the regular expression does. You can even put placeholders (e.g. %1$s) and use Java's String.format to replace the placeholders with the actual string you need to use; for example:

static public final String WITH_DELIMITER = "((?<=%1$s)|(?=%1$s))";

public void someMethod() {
    final String[] aEach = "a;b;c;d".split(String.format(WITH_DELIMITER, ";"));
    ...
}

You want to use lookarounds, and split on zero-width matches. Here are some examples:

public class SplitNDump {
    static void dump(String[] arr) {
        for (String s : arr) {
            System.out.format("[%s]", s);
        }
        System.out.println();
    }
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        dump("1,234,567,890".split(","));
        // "[1][234][567][890]"
        dump("1,234,567,890".split("(?=,)"));   
        // "[1][,234][,567][,890]"
        dump("1,234,567,890".split("(?<=,)"));  
        // "[1,][234,][567,][890]"
        dump("1,234,567,890".split("(?<=,)|(?=,)"));
        // "[1][,][234][,][567][,][890]"

        dump(":a:bb::c:".split("(?=:)|(?<=:)"));
        // "[][:][a][:][bb][:][:][c][:]"
        dump(":a:bb::c:".split("(?=(?!^):)|(?<=:)"));
        // "[:][a][:][bb][:][:][c][:]"
        dump(":::a::::b  b::c:".split("(?=(?!^):)(?<!:)|(?!:)(?<=:)"));
        // "[:::][a][::::][b  b][::][c][:]"
        dump("a,bb:::c  d..e".split("(?!^)\\b"));
        // "[a][,][bb][:::][c][  ][d][..][e]"

        dump("ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException".split("(?<=[a-z])(?=[A-Z])"));
        // "[Array][Index][Out][Of][Bounds][Exception]"
        dump("1234567890".split("(?<=\\G.{4})"));   
        // "[1234][5678][90]"

        // Split at the end of each run of letter
        dump("Boooyaaaah! Yippieeee!!".split("(?<=(?=(.)\\1(?!\\1))..)"));
        // "[Booo][yaaaa][h! Yipp][ieeee][!!]"
    }
}

And yes, that is triply-nested assertion there in the last pattern.

Related questions

• Java split is eating my characters.
• Can you use zero-width matching regex in String split?
• How do I convert CamelCase into human-readable names in Java?
• Backreferences in lookbehind

See also

• regular-expressions.info/Lookarounds

A very naive solution, that doesn't involve regex would be to perform a string replace on your delimiter along the lines of (assuming comma for delimiter):

string.replace(FullString, "," , "~,~")

Where you can replace tilda (~) with an appropriate unique delimiter.

Then if you do a split on your new delimiter then i believe you will get the desired result.

import java.util.regex.*;
import java.util.LinkedList;

public class Splitter {
    private static final Pattern DEFAULT_PATTERN = Pattern.compile("\\s+");

    private Pattern pattern;
    private boolean keep_delimiters;

    public Splitter(Pattern pattern, boolean keep_delimiters) {
        this.pattern = pattern;
        this.keep_delimiters = keep_delimiters;
    }
    public Splitter(String pattern, boolean keep_delimiters) {
        this(Pattern.compile(pattern==null?"":pattern), keep_delimiters);
    }
    public Splitter(Pattern pattern) { this(pattern, true); }
    public Splitter(String pattern) { this(pattern, true); }
    public Splitter(boolean keep_delimiters) { this(DEFAULT_PATTERN, keep_delimiters); }
    public Splitter() { this(DEFAULT_PATTERN); }

    public String[] split(String text) {
        if (text == null) {
            text = "";
        }

        int last_match = 0;
        LinkedList<String> splitted = new LinkedList<String>();

        Matcher m = this.pattern.matcher(text);

        while (m.find()) {

            splitted.add(text.substring(last_match,m.start()));

            if (this.keep_delimiters) {
                splitted.add(m.group());
            }

            last_match = m.end();
        }

        splitted.add(text.substring(last_match));

        return splitted.toArray(new String[splitted.size()]);
    }

    public static void main(String[] argv) {
        if (argv.length != 2) {
            System.err.println("Syntax: java Splitter <pattern> <text>");
            return;
        }

        Pattern pattern = null;
        try {
            pattern = Pattern.compile(argv[0]);
        }
        catch (PatternSyntaxException e) {
            System.err.println(e);
            return;
        }

        Splitter splitter = new Splitter(pattern);

        String text = argv[1];
        int counter = 1;
        for (String part : splitter.split(text)) {
            System.out.printf("Part %d: \"%s\"\n", counter++, part);
        }
    }
}

/*
    Example:
    > java Splitter "\W+" "Hello World!"
    Part 1: "Hello"
    Part 2: " "
    Part 3: "World"
    Part 4: "!"
    Part 5: ""
*/

I don't really like the other way, where you get an empty element in front and back. A delimiter is usually not at the beginning or at the end of the string, thus you most often end up wasting two good array slots.

Edit: Fixed limit cases. Commented source with test cases can be found here: http://snippets.dzone.com/posts/show/6453

Pass the 3rd aurgument as "true". It will return delimiters as well.

StringTokenizer(String str, String delimiters, true);