Split a string by a byte

Question

I have a String which has some ASCII control characters in it (namely RS (0x1e) and US (0x1f)). I have defined them in my code as such:

static public final byte RS  = 0x1E;
static public final byte US  = 0x1F;

later in my code, I want to split a string using these characters:

String[] records = content.split(String.valueOf(RS));

but, that doesn't work correctly. After some fiddling I found that this

String[] records = content.split("\u001e");

does work, but in that case, I have to remember the codes. I do use the RS static byte also in other parts, so just changing that is not a real option. I could of course create a RS_STRING or something, but that means double work.

Any clean good solution for this?

Answer 1

Declaring the character as a char rather than a byte fixed it for me - the following works fine:

char RS  = 0x1E;
String s = new String(new char[]{'d', RS, 'e'});
System.out.println(s.split(String.valueOf(RS)).length); //Prints 2

However, using a byte as the type causes it to fail:

byte RS  = 0x1E;
String s = new String(new char[]{'d', (char)RS, 'e'});
System.out.println(s.split(String.valueOf(RS)).length); //Prints 1

You can of course cast the char back to byte if you need to refer to it as such in other parts of your code.