Question

I have a large string that contains fixed value fields, this group of fields can repeat from 0 to 40 times. I would like to parse this list into an arraylist but I am not sure of the best way to do this?

The string data is as follows,

 CountryCode = 2 character
 StateProv   = 7 characters
 PostalCode  = 10 characters
 BuildingNum = 5 characters

There is no delimiter the pattern just repeats

any suggestion?

Answer 1

I’d probably just read repeated substrings:

private static final int PATTERN_LENGTH = 24;
....

List<Location> list = new ArrayList<Location>();

if (text.length() % PATTERN_LENGTH != 0)
{
    // throw an exception of some description; you haven't got valid data
}
for (int start = 0; start < text.length(); start += PATTERN_LENGTH)
{
    list.add(Location.parse(text.substring(start, start + PATTERN_LENGTH));
}

(Or perform the parsing in the boody of the loop, or whatever… the main point is you’ve got the substring.)