I have a series of strings with the following format: "animal || type || area ||".
In Java, I’m trying to split the string so I can just the first part. Everything I have read online says to split the string:
String animalString = "animal || type || area"
String animalArray[] = animalString.split("||")
System.out.println("result = " + Arrays.toString(animalArray));
However, when I split the string it doesn’t merely split based on the ‘||’ division but instead splits every letter:
result = [a, n, i, m, a, l, , |, |, , t, y, p, e, , |, |, , a, r, e, a, , |, |]
When I add a delimiter to the split method, it delimits the first part of the string, so that is not effective.
How can I split a string that has the above format so I can get the three words themselves in an array and not just the letters?
>Solution :
You need to double escape them. Once for the String and once for the regex. \\ escapes the slash so it can be passed on to the regex as \| which escapes the |.
The \\s* allows for 0 or more white spaces before and after the ||
String animalString = "animal || type || area";
String animalArray[] = animalString.split("\\s*\\|\\|\\s*");
System.out.println("result = " + Arrays.toString(animalArray));
prints
result = [animal, type, area]