StringTokenizer not helping in splitting

[Poornima Sharma]

Hi Friends,

I am getting a set of strings with backslash (\) as the delimiter. These set of strings contain only values and they are in a set of sequence. The sequence helps us determine the keys of the particular value.

Such as

String s="s\\a\\b\\\\\\\\\\d";

I am using StringTokenizer to get the values. But its not working. StringTokenizer is not giving me the correct position. What should be the alternative in such a situation please suggest.

Thanks,

[Swastik Dey]

Considering the variable s, what is expected output with StringTokenizer and what output are you getting?

[Poornima Sharma]

Considering variable s what i am getting is :-

s
a
b
d

and what I am looking is

s
a
b




d

[Swastik Dey]

split method of String might help

String splitted[]=s.split("\\\\");
		for(int x=0;x<splitted.length;x++){
			System.out.println(splitted[x]);
		}

[Mohamed Sanaulla]

StringTokenizer Javadoc wrote:StringTokenizer is a legacy class that is retained for compatibility reasons although its use is discouraged in new code. It is recommended that anyone seeking this functionality use the split method of String or the java.util.regex package instead.

[Poornima Sharma]

yes, this worked, thanks a lot. But the logic of doing this is not clear and why "\\" does not work here and "\\\\" works.

[Swastik Dey]

As you know \ is an escape character. So to denote one \ we need two \es and to denote two \es we need 4 \es. Correct me if I am wrong.

[Campbell Ritchie]

Swastik Dey wrote:. . . Correct me if I am wrong.

You are correct. And you need to consider the \\ in both locations. Try this

System.out.println("s\\a\\b\\\\\\\\\\d");

and see how many \ you get printed out.

Also, in String#split() you are using a regular expression, and \ is an escape character there too. So "\\\\" matches the Sring \\ which is the regular expression to match \. But in the String "s\\a\\b\\\\\\\\\\d" you have one \ between s and a, so you need the regular expession \\, which is expressed as the String literal "\\\\".