Splitting a string on special char

Question

I have a string "0000_Clothing|0000_Clothing_Men's|0000_Clothing_Men's_Shirts", and i wanted to split this string on "|".

String CatArray[] = CatContext.split("|");

The above mentioned code is splitting the string into seperate characters like 0,0,0,0,_,C including the | symbol.

What Am i missing here?

Answer 1

| is a regex metacharacter, escape it "\\\\|"

Answer 2

Split method expects a regex and you will have to escape |

You can do either

CatContext.split("\\|");

or

CatContext.split("[|]");

Answer 3

Note that public String[] split(String regex) takes a regex .

So you should escape the special char | . Escaping a regex is done by \\ , but in Java, \\ is written as \\\\ .

When you escape the special character, you're telling Java:

"Don't treat | as the special char | , treat it as it was the regular char | ".

Another solution is to use public static String quote(String s) that " Returns a literal pattern String for the specified String ":

String[] CatArray = CatContext.split(Pattern.quote("|"));

Answer 4

If you don't want to deal with escaping the pipe (since pipe is a special regex character) then you can use Pattern#quote :

String[] catArray = CatContext.split(Pattern.quote("|"));

OR even simpler:

String[] catArray = CatContext.split("\\Q|\\E"));