Question

I have following code in my program. It splits a line when a hyphen is encountered and stores each word in the String Array ‘tokens’. But I want the hyphen also to be stored in the String Array ‘tokens’ when it is encountered in a sentence.

String[] tokens = line.split("-");

The above code splits the sentence but also totally ignores the hyphen in the resulting array.
What can I do to store hyphen also in the resulting array?

Answer 1

Edit : –

Seems like you want to split on both whitespaces and hyphen but keeping only the hyphen in the array (As, I infer from your this line – stores each word in the String Array), you can use this: –

String[] tokens = "abc this is-a hyphen def".split("((?<=-)|(?=-))|\\s+");
System.out.println(Arrays.toString(tokens));

Output: –

[abc, this, is, -, a, hyphen, def]

---

For handling spaces before and after hyphen, you can first trim those spaces using replaceAll method, and then do split: –

"abc this is - a hyphen def".replaceAll("[ ]*-[ ]*", "-")
                            .split("((?<=-)|(?=-))|\\s+");

---

Previous answer : –

You can use this: –

String[] tokens = "abc-efg".split("((?<=-)|(?=-))");
System.out.println(Arrays.toString(tokens));

OUTPUT : –

[abc, -, efg]

It splits on an empty character before and after the hyphen (-).