Splitting letters and numbers in a string in java

Question

I need to be able to break apart a string into its letters and its numbers. The strings it will be looking at are something along the lines of

"dir1" "path11"

I will also need to temporarily store the 2 values. I have found the .split method and it looks like it could be what I'm after but I can't figure out how to use it, should I keep looking into it or is there a better way?

Answer 1

Use String.split() as in

String[] strings = "abc111".split("(?=\\d+)(?<=\\D+)");

The split() function takes a regex around which the string will be split up.

Here the pattern has two assertions: one which asserts that the characters ahead are digits alone and another one which asserts that the preceding characters are non-digits. So it will split just after the end of non-digits (which is just before the beginning of digits).

Answer 2

Regex and split can help to do that:

public static void main(String[] args) {
String[] c = "path11".split("(?<=\\D)(?=\\d)|(?<=\\d)(?=\\D)");
System.out.println(Arrays.toString(c));
}

output=

[path, 11]