Question

I have some text like:

DESC:manner How did serfdom develop in and then leave Russia ?
ENTY:cremat What films featured the character Popeye Doyle ?
DESC:manner How can I find a list of celebrities ' real names ?

I read them line by line and I want to convert each line to a string Array word by word .
like this:

Array = [DESC, :, manner, How, did, serfdom ,develop, in ,and ,then ,leave, Russia ,?]

Answer 1

The problem is that you want to keep some delimiters and not others (keep : and loose the spaces). I think you need a regular expresion to accomplish this. Something like this should do it:

String str = "DESC:manner How did serfdom develop in and then leave Russia ?";
String arr[] = str.split("((?<=:)|(?=:))|( )");

This uses the Lookahead and Lookbehind RegEx to find/keep the delimiter : while we added in a normal split for the space ( ) to trash those.

After this arr should be:

arr = [DESC, :, manner, How, did, serfdom, develop, in, and, then, leave, Russia, ?]