Java string.split - by multiple character delimiter [duplicate]

Question

I would like to parse entire file based on all the possible delimiters like commas, colon, semi colons, periods, spaces, hiphens etcs.

Suppose I have a hypothetical string line "Hi,X How-how are:any you?" I should get output array with items Hi,X,How,how,are,any and you.

How do I specify all these delimiter in String.split method?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

String.split takes a regular expression, in this case, you want non-word characters (regex \W) to be the split, so it's simply:

String input = "Hi,X How-how are:any you?"; String[] parts = input.split("[\\W]"); 

If you wanted to be more explicit, you could use the exact characters in the expression:

String[] parts = input.split("[,\\s\\-:\\?]");