Question

I have a query that concatenates the values of two columns and returns a string as shown below:

423545(50),AXX-10, ABB-1234X(30), 7568787(50),53654656,2021947(50),ABCD-2343423,FDKHD-324342(20),

I would like to split that string and put it in an array discarding all the values in the brackets. The output to be as shown below:

[423545,AXX-10, ABB-1234X, 7568787,53654656,2021947,ABCD-2343423,FDKHD-324342]

• The comma at the end of the string is optional
• Not all the columns contain the bracketed values

I know i can use String.split() but the optional bracketed values and comma at the end of the string complicates it.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

You can split on two patterns: –

• One on \\(\\d+\\),[ ]*, which will take care of bracketed terms
• Secondly on ,[ ]*, which will work for normal , separated values.

You just need to merge those regex using a pipe(|), and perform the split at once.

So, your split criteria becomes: –

str.split("(?:\\(\\d+\\),[ ]*)|(?:,[ ]*)");

which can be further simplified to: –

str.split("(?:\\(\\d+\\))?,[ ]*");

We just made a part optional, and took the common part outside.