Question

How do you set the delimiter for a scanner to either ; or new line?

I tried:
Scanner.useDelimiter(Pattern.compile("(\n)|;"));
But it doesn’t work.

Answer 1

As a general rule, in patterns, you need to double the \.

So, try

Scanner.useDelimiter(Pattern.compile("(\\n)|;"));

or

Scanner.useDelimiter(Pattern.compile("[\\n;]"));

Edit: If \r\n is the problem, you might want to try this:

Scanner.useDelimiter(Pattern.compile("[\\r\\n;]+"));

which matches one or more of \r, \n, and ;.

Note: I haven’t tried these.