Java StringTokenizer, empty null tokens

Question

I am trying to split a string into 29 tokens..... stringtokenizer won't return null tokens. I tried string.split, but I believe I am doing something wrong:

String [] strings = line.split(",", 29);

sample inputs:

10150,15:58,23:58,16:00,00:00,15:55,23:55,15:58,00:01,16:03,23:58,,,,,16:00,23:22,15:54,00:03,15:59,23:56,16:05,23:59,15:55,00:01,,,,
10155,,,,,,,,,,,07:30,13:27,07:25,13:45,,,,,,,,,,,07:13,14:37,08:01,15:23
10160,10:00,16:02,09:55,16:03,10:06,15:58,09:48,16:07,09:55,16:00,,,,,09:49,15:38,10:02,16:04,10:00,16:00,09:58,16:01,09:57,15:58,,,,

Answer 1

If you want the trailing empty strings to be kept, but you don't want to give a magic number for maximum, use a negative limit:

line.split(",", -1)

If line.equals("a,,c"), then line.split(",", -1)[1].isEmpty(); it's not null. This is because when "," is the delimiter, then ",," has an empty string between the two delimiters, not null.

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Example:

Using the explanation above, consider the following example: ",,"

Although you might expect ",", null, and ",".

The actual result is ",", "" and ","

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If you want null instead of empty strings in the array returned by split, then you'd have to manually scan the array and replace them with null. I'm not sure why s == null is better than s.isEmpty(), though.

See also

• Java String.indexOf and empty strings

Answer 2

Use StringUtils.splitPreserveAllTokens() in Apache Commons Lang library