String.split() *not* on regular expression?

Question

Since String.split() works with regular expressions, this snippet:

String s = \"str?str?argh\";
s.split(\"r?\");

... yields: <

Answer 1

Escape the ?:

s.split("r\\?");

Answer 2

You can use

StringUtils.split("?r")

from commons-lang.

Answer 3

Using directly the Pattern class, is possible to define the expression as LITERAL, and in that case, the expression will be evaluated as is (not regex expression).

Pattern.compile(<literalExpression>, Pattern.LITERAL).split(<stringToBeSplitted>);

example:

String[] result = Pattern.compile("r?", Pattern.LITERAL).split("str?str?argh");

will result:

[st, st, argh]

Answer 4

A general solution using just Java SE APIs is:

String separator = ...
s.split(Pattern.quote(separator));

The quote method returns a regex that will match the argument string as a literal.

Answer 5

Use Guava Splitter:

Extracts non-overlapping substrings from an input string, typically by recognizing appearances of a separator sequence. This separator can be specified as a single character, fixed string, regular expression or CharMatcher instance. Or, instead of using a separator at all, a splitter can extract adjacent substrings of a given fixed length.

Answer 6

try

String s = "str?str?argh";
s.split("r\?");