String delimiter in string.split method

Question

I have following data:

1||1||Abdul-Jabbar||Karim||1996||1974 

I want to delimit the tokens.

Here the delimiter is "||".

My delimiter setter is:

public void setDelimiter(String delimiter) {     char[] c = delimiter.toCharArray();     this.delimiter = "\"" + "\\" + c[0] + "\\" + c[1] + "\"";     System.out.println("Delimiter string is: " + this.delimiter); } 

However,

String[] tokens = line.split(delimiter); 

is not giving the required result.

Answer 1

There is no need to set the delimiter by breaking it up in pieces like you have done.

Here is a complete program you can compile and run:

import java.util.Arrays; public class SplitExample {     public static final String PLAYER = "1||1||Abdul-Jabbar||Karim||1996||1974";     public static void main(String[] args) {         String[] data = PLAYER.split("\\|\\|");         System.out.println(Arrays.toString(data));     } } 

If you want to use split with a pattern, you can use Pattern.compile or Pattern.quote.

To see compile and quote in action, here is an example using all three approaches:

import java.util.Arrays; import java.util.regex.Pattern; public class SplitExample {     public static final String PLAYER = "1||1||Abdul-Jabbar||Karim||1996||1974";     public static void main(String[] args) {         String[] data = PLAYER.split("\\|\\|");         System.out.println(Arrays.toString(data));          Pattern pattern = Pattern.compile("\\|\\|");         data = pattern.split(PLAYER);         System.out.println(Arrays.toString(data));          pattern = Pattern.compile(Pattern.quote("||"));         data = pattern.split(PLAYER);         System.out.println(Arrays.toString(data));     } } 

The use of patterns is recommended if you are going to split often using the same pattern. BTW the output is:

[1, 1, Abdul-Jabbar, Karim, 1996, 1974] [1, 1, Abdul-Jabbar, Karim, 1996, 1974] [1, 1, Abdul-Jabbar, Karim, 1996, 1974] 

Answer 2

Use the Pattern#quote() method for escaping ||. Try:

final String[] tokens = myString.split(Pattern.quote("||")); 

This is required because | is an alternation character and hence gains a special meaning when passed to split call (basically the argument to split is a regular expression in string form).