Question

I have a string using the pipe symbol “| as the delimiter. However, the string data also contains the pipe symbol. Is there a way to ignore this?

Example:

name|address|age

John|123 Wood Road|Street, London|25

Therefore when I do this –

text.split("\\|")

gives me:

John

123 Wood Road

Street, London

25

I am expecting this:

John

123 Wood Road|Street, London

25

Answer 1

String.split() can’t differentiate between different occurrences of the same symbol. You’ll have to put in place some rules, either in code or in a regex. Based on your data, I’m guessing that while you say that pipe can occur within the string data, it really can’t occur in name or age, so you could do something like this:

String[] results = text.split("\\|")

String name = results[0];
String age = results[results.length - 1]

String address = results[1];
for (int i = 2; i < results.length-1; i++) {
    address = address + "|" + results[i];
}