String delimiter in string.split method

Question

I have following data:

1||1||Abdul-Jabbar||Karim||1996||1974

I want to delimit the tokens.

Here the delimiter is "||".

My delimiter setter is:

public void setDelimiter(String delimiter) {
    char[] c = delimiter.toCharArray();
    this.delimiter = "\"" + "\\" + c[0] + "\\" + c[1] + "\"";
    System.out.println("Delimiter string is: " + this.delimiter);
}

However,

String[] tokens = line.split(delimiter);

is not giving the required result.

Answer 1

There is no need to set the delimiter by breaking it up in pieces like you have done.

Here is a complete program you can compile and run:

import java.util.Arrays;
public class SplitExample {
    public static final String PLAYER = "1||1||Abdul-Jabbar||Karim||1996||1974";
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        String[] data = PLAYER.split("\\|\\|");
        System.out.println(Arrays.toString(data));
    }
}

If you want to use split with a pattern, you can use Pattern.compile or Pattern.quote.

To see compile and quote in action, here is an example using all three approaches:

import java.util.Arrays;
import java.util.regex.Pattern;
public class SplitExample {
    public static final String PLAYER = "1||1||Abdul-Jabbar||Karim||1996||1974";
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        String[] data = PLAYER.split("\\|\\|");
        System.out.println(Arrays.toString(data));

        Pattern pattern = Pattern.compile("\\|\\|");
        data = pattern.split(PLAYER);
        System.out.println(Arrays.toString(data));

        pattern = Pattern.compile(Pattern.quote("||"));
        data = pattern.split(PLAYER);
        System.out.println(Arrays.toString(data));
    }
}

The use of patterns is recommended if you are going to split often using the same pattern. BTW the output is:

[1, 1, Abdul-Jabbar, Karim, 1996, 1974]
[1, 1, Abdul-Jabbar, Karim, 1996, 1974]
[1, 1, Abdul-Jabbar, Karim, 1996, 1974]