Splitting a Java String by the pipe symbol using split(“|”)

Question

The Java official documentation states:

The string \"boo:and:foo\", for example, yields the following results with these expressions Regex Result :

Answer 1

You can also use .split("[|]").

(I used this instead of .split("\\|"), which didn't work for me.)

Answer 2

test.split("\\|",999);

Specifing a limit or max will be accurate for examples like: "boo|||a" or "||boo|" or " |||"

But test.split("\\|"); will return different length strings arrays for the same examples.

use reference: link

Answer 3

the split() method takes a regular expression as an argument

Answer 4

You need

test.split("\\|");

split uses regular expression and in regex | is a metacharacter representing the OR operator. You need to escape that character using \ (written in String as "\\" since \ is also a metacharacter in String literals and require another \ to escape it).

You can also use

test.split(Pattern.quote("|"));

and let Pattern.quote create the escaped version of the regex representing |.

Answer 5

You could also use the apache library and do this:

StringUtils.split(test, "|");

Answer 6

Use proper escaping: string.split("\\|")

Or, in Java 5+, use the helper Pattern.quote() which has been created for exactly this purpose:

string.split(Pattern.quote("|"))

which works with arbitrary input strings. Very useful when you need to quote / escape user input.