Splitting a string on the double pipe(||) using String.split()

Question

I'm trying to split the string with double pipe(||) being the delimiter.String looks something like this:

String str ="[email protected]||[email protected]||[email protected]";

i'm able to split it using the StringTokeniser.The javadoc says the use of this class is discouraged and instead look at String.split as option.

StringTokenizer token = new StringTokenizer(str, "||");

The above code works fine.But not able to figure out why below string.split function not giving me expected result..

String[] strArry = str.split("\\||");

Where am i going wrong..?

Solution 1

String.split() uses regular expressions. You need to escape the string that you want to use as divider.

Pattern has a method to do this for you, namely Pattern.quote(String s).

String[] split = str.split(Pattern.quote("||"));

Solution 2

You must escape every single | like this str.split("\\|\\|")

Solution 3

try this bellow :

String[] strArry = str.split("\\|\\|");

Comments

[CsBalazsHungary]

isn't it "\|\|"? Am I mistaken?

[gtgaxiola]

@CsBalazsHungary you also must escape the `\` since is also a meta character

[nfechner]

@CsBalazsHungary You also need to escape the `\`, because it's the Java string escape sequence.

[Tim Goodman]

@CsBalazsHungary Because it's RegEx, you need to escape | as \|. But because the RegEx is being built from a string, you need to additionally escape \ as \\.

[Sentry]

@CsBalazsHungary No, because that would be a Java-escape, but we want a regex-escape

[Toon Casteele]

Oh, didn't know | was a regex char. I'll get the hang of that regex soon :p

[CsBalazsHungary]

@gtgaxiola Oh ok, thanks, I didn't use this yet just with \"! I mean not with regex