What is the best way to extract the first word from a string in Java?

Question

Trying to write a short method so that I can parse a string and extract the first word. I have been looking for the best way to do this.

I assume I would use str.split(","), however I would like to grab just the first first word from a string, and save that in one variable, and and put the rest of the tokens in another variable.

Is there a concise way of doing this?

Answer 1

The second parameter of the split method is optional, and if specified will split the target string only N times.

For example:

String mystring = "the quick brown fox"; String arr[] = mystring.split(" ", 2);  String firstWord = arr[0];   //the String theRest = arr[1];     //quick brown fox 

Alternatively you could use the substring method of String.

Answer 2

You should be doing this

String input = "hello world, this is a line of text";  int i = input.indexOf(' '); String word = input.substring(0, i); String rest = input.substring(i); 

The above is the fastest way of doing this task.