Regex String.split( )

Question

I'm using java to split a String of the form:

String stringToSplit = "AAA BBB CCC DDD EEE FFF GGG HHH III JJJ KKK";

I'm using

String[] tokens = stringToParse.split("\\s");

to split the strings along whitespace, giving:

tokens = {"AAA","BBB","CCC", "DDD","EEE","FFF","GGG","HHH","III", "JJJ", "KKK"} 

What I need to do now is split along whitespace for most of them, but also keep some strings together in specific cases. For instance, I want "CCC DDD" and "III JJJ KKK" to stay as their full strings when I split. So I want my array of tokens to be:

tokens = {"AAA","BBB","CCC DDD","EEE","FFF","GGG","HHH","III JJJ KKK"}

What regex would I use? Is this possible?

Answer 1

You could replace ccc ddd with ccc_ddd and then covert the underscore back to a space later.

You might want to invest in some kind of syntax parser if you're going to be doing lots of this kind of thing

Answer 2

Instead of using split(), you could use the following method where you find all consecutive non-whitespace characters, but use alternation to also match your specific target strings that contain whitespace:

Pattern p = Pattern.compile("CCC DDD|III JJJ KKK|\\S+");
Matcher m = p.matcher("AAA BBB CCC DDD EEE FFF GGG HHH III JJJ KKK");
while(m.find()) {
    System.out.println(m.group());
}

Example: http://ideone.com/AxI1CV