Question

Currently I am splitting a string by spaces. However there are some double spaces that I want to preserve when I put them all back together. Any suggestions on how to do this?

I.e. the string "I went to the beach. I ate pie" is getting split as

I
went
to
the
beach.

I
ate
pie

I don’t want the blank entries but I want to put it back together to the same format. Thanks all!

Answer 1

Do a String replaceAll(” “, ” unlikelyCharacterSequence”) and then split your string by spaces as normal. Then you can convert back to a double space by replacing your {unlikelyCharacterSequence} with ” ” at the end.

However: this will fail if you ever encounter your “unlikely” character sequence in your actual, unmodified String. For a more general purpose solution, check the alternative listed below this example.

Example (warning, depends on non-existance of !@#!@# :

String example = "Hello.  That was a double space. That was a single space."
String formatted = example.replace("  ", " !@#!@#");
String [] split = formatted.split(" ");
for(int i = 0; i < split.length; i++)
{
  split.replace("!@#!@#", " ");
}
// Recombine your splits?

Alternatively you could take a more robust strategy of recombining the string as you have it in your question but ignoring elements containing only a single space:

String example = "ThisShouldBeTwoElements.  ButItIsNot.";
String [] splitString = example.split(" ");
String recombined = "";
for(int i = 0; i < splitString.length; i++)
{
  if(!splitString[i].equals(" "))
    recombined += splitString[i];
}