Question

I have a string with zero or more whitespace-separated words, that needs to be split into an array of words. This is what I did. But the post-processing step, where I handle the case that the input string contained no words, suggests to me that I should have used some other way than String.split(). Should I?

String[] split_arguments(String arguments) {
    String[] result = arguments.split("[\t ]+");
    if (result.length == 1 && result[0].equals("")) {
        result = new String[0];
    }
    return result;
}

Answer 1

Why not simply trim the leading and trailing whitespace and check for that case prior to splitting. Also, you might simply use the predefined whitespace character class.

String[] split_arguments(String arguments) {
    if(arguments == null) {
        return null;
    }
    String trimmedArguments = arguments.trim();
    if(trimmedArguments.length() == 0) {
        return null;
    }

    return trimmedArguments.split("\\s+");
}