Java Strange split behavior with | character

Question

I have a little file that contains some content that I want to split with the "|" character.

When I tried it with any other character (eg. ">"), it worked perfectally fine, but with the "|" character, there were some unexpected outcomes.

---

The line itself (here with the > character)
addere>to add>(1)

Split ">" outcome
[addere, to add, (1)]

Split "|" outcome
[, a, d, d, e, r, e, |, t, o, , a, d, d, |, (, 1, )]

---

Why is it splitting everything and even ignoring the "|" character in the string itself?
Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

You must escape the pipe character with a backslash, because its meaning is special in a regex. Then you must escape the backslash for Java itself. Try:

text.split("\\|")

Answer 2

Since | is a meta character,It works when you escape that.

String[]  array =youString.split("\\|");

oracle docs on the same