String split not returning empty results

Question

I\'m trying to use

\"value1:value2::value3\".split(\":\");

Problem is that I want it to include the blank results.

It returns:

Answer 1

This works,

import java.io.BufferedReader;
import java.io.FileReader;
import java.io.File;
import java.io.IOException;

public class split {
public static void main(String[] args)
{
    String data = null;
    try {
    BufferedReader br = new BufferedReader(new FileReader(new File("split.csv")));
    while( (data=br.readLine())!=null)
    {
        System.out.println("line:"+data);
        String[] cols = data.split(":",-1);
        System.out.println("count:"+cols.length);
        for(int x=0;x

Here is a test file,

a:b:c:d:e
a:b:c:d:
a:b:c::
a:b::: 
a::::
::::
::::e
:::d:e
::c:d:e
:b:c:d:e
a:b:c:d:e