Question

I have a String with an unknown length that looks something like this

"dog, cat, bear, elephant, ..., giraffe"

What would be the optimal way to divide this string at the commas so each word could become an element of an ArrayList?

For example

List<String> strings = new ArrayList<Strings>();
// Add the data here so strings.get(0) would be equal to "dog",
// strings.get(1) would be equal to "cat" and so forth.

Answer 1

You could do this:

String str = "...";
List<String> elephantList = Arrays.asList(str.split(","));

Basically the .split() method will split the string according to (in this case) delimiter you are passing and will return an array of strings.

However, you seem to be after a List of Strings rather than an array, so the array must be turned into a list by using the Arrays.asList() utility. Just as an FYI you could also do something like so:

String str = "...";
ArrayList<String> elephantList = new ArrayList<>(Arrays.asList(str.split(","));

But it is usually better practice to program to an interface rather than to an actual concrete implementation, so I would recommend the 1st option.