Java - String splits by every character

Question

When I try to split a string with a delimiter "|", it seems to split every single character.

This is my line which is causing the problem:

String out = myString.split("|");

Answer 1

In regex, | is a reserved character used for alternation. You need to escape it:

String out = string.split("\\|");

Note that we used two backslashes. This is because the first one escapes the second one in the Java string, so the string passed to the regex engine is \|.