Question

I have a very basic task in java:

Split a string into letters (of type String, not char).

What I used first was String.split("123"), which returned a leading empty space "{,1,2,3}".
Since you need to convert the Array into something else or create a new one to remove the first space – I searched for a good appraoch and found many many variants, but all of them are bulky, like using loops and various conversionos.

So how would you convert a String into a collection of letter Strings?

• by using StringBuffers?
• converting to a ArrayList?
• using split and creating a new Array without leading empty space?
• use Tokenizer?

How does a short, clear approach look like?

My favorite for now is

    String[] singleLetters = string.split("");
    singleLetters = Arrays.copyOfRange(singleLetters, 1, singleLetters.length);

A better approach is:

    String[] singleLetters = string.split("(?!^)")  

Answer 1

str.split("(?!^)")

The regex will prevent the empty string at the beginning from matching, so the result will not contain starting empty string. This solution will work without any assumption.