String split question

[Arthur Jenkins]

Hi all
I have a line of data in a txt file that I need to read in and apply some basic business rules too. I have used the stringtokenizer to split up the line, but I read somewhere that better performance can be reached if I split it up, but I can't get it to work?
Below is the line of text:
16|arthur|6006477|1810324||M|01011800|828300|003|30|285.33|0
The delimiter is a pipe |.
I have tried both these commands, but my array still doesn't contain the token between the pipes.
1. "Pattern pattern = Pattern.compile( String.valueOf('|') );
String[] splits = pattern.split( lineOfData );"
2. "String[] splits = lineOfData.split("|");"
lineOfData is the pipe delimited line that I have read in.
And advise would be greatly appreciated.
Many thanks
AJ

[Jim Yingst]

I hope that String.valueOf('|') wasn't the first thing you tried - "|" is much more straightforward. But maybe when that didn't work you experimented with other more convoluted options out of desperation? That would make sense. Anyway, the problem here is that | is a special character in regular expressions (indicating "or", as in "foo|bar" will match "foo" or "bar". "|" matches [empty string] or [empty string] - and you can find empty strings between any two chars in your input, which is why the split() returns each character as a separate field. In order to use | as if it were a normal character, you must escape it with \\ - one \ for the regex parser, and one more \ to escape the other \ for the Java compiler. :roll: . Weird I know. Reasonable complete docs for regular expressions can be found at java.util.regex.Pattern.
[ May 04, 2003: Message edited by: Jim Yingst ]

[Arthur Jenkins]

Hi Jim
Thanks for your reply, which sorted out the problem 100%.
Many thanks for your help.
AJ