Splitting string N into N/X strings

Question

I would like some guidance on how to split a string into N number of separate strings based on a arithmetical operation; for example string.length()/300.

I am aware of ways to do it with delimiters such as

testString.split(",");

but how does one uses greedy/reluctant/possessive quantifiers with the split method?

---

Update: As per request a similar example of what am looking to achieve;

String X = "32028783836295C75546F7272656E745C756E742E657865000032002E002E005C0"

Resulting in X/3 (more or less... done by hand)

X[0] = 32028783836295C75546F

X[1] = 6E745C756E742E6578650

x[2] = 65000032002E002E005C0

Dont worry about explaining how to put it into the array, I have no problem with that, only on how to split without using a delimiter, but an arithmetic operation

Answer 1

You could do that by splitting on (?<=\G.{5}) whereby the string aaaaabbbbbccccceeeeefff would be split into the following parts:

aaaaa
bbbbb
ccccc
eeeee
fff

The \G matches the (zero-width) position where the previous match occurred. Initially, \G starts at the beginning of the string. Note that by default the . meta char does not match line breaks, so if you want it to match every character, enable DOT-ALL: (?s)(?<=\G.{5}).

A demo:

class Main {
  public static void main(String[] args) {
    int N = 5;
    String text = "aaaaabbbbbccccceeeeefff";
    String[] tokens = text.split("(?<=\\G.{" + N + "})");
    for(String t : tokens) {
      System.out.println(t);
    }
  }
}

which can be tested online here: http://ideone.com/q6dVB

EDIT

Since you asked for documentation on regex, here are the specific tutorials for the topics the suggested regex contains:

• \G, see: http://www.regular-expressions.info/continue.html
• (?<=...), see: http://www.regular-expressions.info/lookaround.html
• {...}, see: http://www.regular-expressions.info/repeat.html

Answer 2

If there's a fixed length that you want each String to be, you can use Guava's Splitter:

int length = string.length() / 300;
Iterable<String> splitStrings = Splitter.fixedLength(length).split(string);

Each String in splitStrings with the possible exception of the last will have a length of length. The last may have a length between 1 and length.

Note that unlike String.split, which first builds an ArrayList<String> and then uses toArray() on that to produce the final String[] result, Guava's Splitter is lazy and doesn't do anything with the input string when split is called. The actual splitting and returning of strings is done as you iterate through the resulting Iterable. This allows you to just iterate over the results without allocating a data structure and storing them all or to copy them into any kind of Collection you want without going through the intermediate ArrayList and String[]. Depending on what you want to do with the results, this can be considerably more efficient. It's also much more clear what you're doing than with a regex.