Question

I have string which should be split on "." (point) and " " (space). I have tried:

s.split("[\\s\\.]")

but it doesn’t work, because it hasn’t split this string normally – "123 456 . 11323 1".

How should I change my regular expression?

Answer 1

You will get a lot of blank spaces if you only split on a single character.

s.split("[\\s\\.]+")

will produce “123”, “456”, “11323”, “1”.

The + causes it to treat any run of spaces and dots as a single break instead of returning a string between adjacent spaces and dots.

You might still get blank strings at either end of your results since given " 123" it will split between the start of the string and “123”.