StringTokenizer and String split - split on special character

Question

I have the string:

2|HOME ELECTRONICS| |0|0| | | | |0| |

I want to separate all tokens delimited by | in the above string.

I tried to tokenize it with StringTokenizer but it doesn't consider space as a token.

Also, I tried split("|") but it gives each character of the above string as elements in returned string array.

What should I do?

Answer 1

Try

string.split("\\|");

| is a special character and must be espaced with escape character \\ . In Java \\ is written as \\\\ .

That is because String#split() takes regular expression as a parameter.

In a regex special chars like . , | , ( , etc must be escaped. Otherwise, Java will think you are actually using the special char (for example the | means OR ).

Answer 2

Try Scanner instead of StringTokenizer

    Scanner sc = new Scanner(str);
    sc.useDelimiter("\\|");
    while(sc.hasNext()) {
        String e = sc.next();
    }