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javastringwhitespacesplit

How to split a string with any whitespace chars as delimiters

What regex pattern would need I to pass to java.lang.String.split() to split a String into an Array of substrings using all whitespace characters (' ', '\t', '\n', etc.) as delimiters?

Solution

  • Something in the lines of

    myString.split("\\s+");

    This groups all white spaces as a delimiter.

    So if I have the string:

    "Hello[space character][tab character]World"

    This should yield the strings "Hello" and "World" and omit the empty space between the [space] and the [tab].

    As VonC pointed out, the backslash should be escaped, because Java would first try to escape the string to a special character, and send that to be parsed. What you want, is the literal "\s", which means, you need to pass "\\s". It can get a bit confusing.

    The \\s is equivalent to [ \\t\\n\\x0B\\f\\r].