Java StringTokenizer, empty null tokens

Question

I am trying to split a string into 29 tokens..... stringtokenizer won\'t return null tokens. I tried string.split, but I believe I am doing something wrong:

Answer 1

If you want the trailing empty strings to be kept, but you don't want to give a magic number for maximum, use a negative limit:

line.split(",", -1)

If line.equals("a,,c"), then line.split(",", -1)[1].isEmpty(); it's not null. This is because when "," is the delimiter, then ",," has an empty string between the two delimiters, not null.

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Example:

Using the explanation above, consider the following example: ",,"

Although you might expect ",", null, and ",".

The actual result is ",", "" and ","

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If you want null instead of empty strings in the array returned by split, then you'd have to manually scan the array and replace them with null. I'm not sure why s == null is better than s.isEmpty(), though.

See also

• Java String.indexOf and empty strings