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How to split a string with any whitespace chars as delimiters

Sarah Scott |

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?

13 Answers

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].

4

In most regex dialects there are a set of convenient character summaries you can use for this kind of thing - these are good ones to remember:

\w - Matches any word character.

\W - Matches any nonword character.

\s - Matches any white-space character.

\S - Matches anything but white-space characters.

\d - Matches any digit.

\D - Matches anything except digits.

A search for "Regex Cheatsheets" should reward you with a whole lot of useful summaries.

2

To get this working in Javascript, I had to do the following:

myString.split(/\s+/g)
5

"\\s+" should do the trick

2

Also you may have a UniCode non-breaking space xA0...

String[] elements = s.split("[\\s\\xA0]+"); //include uniCode non-breaking
2 
String string = "Ram is going to school";
String[] arrayOfString = string.split("\\s+");
1

Apache Commons Lang has a method to split a string with whitespace characters as delimiters:

StringUtils.split("abc def")

(java.lang.String)

This might be easier to use than a regex pattern.

Since it is a regular expression, and i'm assuming u would also not want non-alphanumeric chars like commas, dots, etc that could be surrounded by blanks (e.g. "one , two" should give [one][two]), it should be:

myString.split(/[\s\W]+/)
0

All you need is to split using the one of the special character of Java Ragex Engine,

and that is- WhiteSpace Character

  • \d Represents a digit: [0-9]
  • \D Represents a non-digit: [^0-9]
  • \s Represents a whitespace character including [ \t\n\x0B\f\r]
  • \S Represents a non-whitespace character as [^\s]
  • \v Represents a vertical whitespace character as [\n\x0B\f\r\x85\u2028\u2029]
  • \V Represents a non-vertical whitespace character as [^\v]
  • \w Represents a word character as [a-zA-Z_0-9]
  • \W Represents a non-word character as [^\w]

Here, the key point to remember is that the small leter character \s represents all types of white spaces including a single space [ ] , tab characters [ ] or anything similar.

So, if you'll try will something like this-

String theString = "Java<a space><a tab>Programming"
String []allParts = theString.split("\\s+");

You will get the desired output.

Some Very Useful Links:

Hope, this might help you the best!!!

you can split a string by line break by using the following statement :

 String textStr[] = yourString.split("\\r?\\n");

you can split a string by Whitespace by using the following statement :

String textStr[] = yourString.split("\\s+");
String str = "Hello World";
String res[] = str.split("\\s+");
0

To split a string with any Unicode whitespace, you need to use

s.split("(?U)\\s+") ^^^^

The (?U) inline embedded flag option is the equivalent of Pattern.UNICODE_CHARACTER_CLASS that enables \s shorthand character class to match any characters from the whitespace Unicode category.

If you want to split with whitespace and keep the whitespaces in the resulting array, use

s.split("(?U)(?<=\\s)(?=\\S)|(?<=\\S)(?=\\s)")

See the regex demo. See Java demo:

String s = "Hello\t World\u00A0»";
System.out.println(Arrays.toString(s.split("(?U)\\s+"))); // => [Hello, World, »]
System.out.println(Arrays.toString(s.split("(?U)(?<=\\s)(?=\\S)|(?<=\\S)(?=\\s)")));
// => [Hello, , World, , »]

Study this code.. good luck

 import java.util.*;
class Demo{ public static void main(String args[]){ Scanner input = new Scanner(System.in); System.out.print("Input String : "); String s1 = input.nextLine(); String[] tokens = s1.split("[\\s\\xA0]+"); System.out.println(tokens.length); for(String s : tokens){ System.out.println(s); } }
}
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