Question

I have a string s that I want to split up so each part separated by the “|” symbol becomes an element of a string array.

Is this how I would go about doing so?

     String s = "FirstName1 LastName1|FirstName2 LastName2|FirstName3 LastName4|";
     String [] names = s.split("|");

I then want to add these elements to an ArrayList. I did the following

      for(int i = 0; i < names.length; i++)
        {
            friendsNames.add(names[i]);
        }

But my ArrayList reads as follows.

  Element 1: F
  Element 2: I
  Element 3: R
  Element 4: S
  Element 5: T
  Element 6: 
  Element 7: N

Any suggestions for where am I going wrong?
etc.

Answer 1

You need to escape the “|” since its a special character in the regex world.

String [] names = s.split("\\|");

Why 2 “\” ?

For the regex expression, you escape the “|” with “\|”. But since “\” is the escape character for Java, you need to escape it to preserve the “\” for the regex expression.