Question

I have strings which look like this:
[item 1, item2, item3]

and my desired output is:

item 1
item2
item3

I wrote this code:

String text = "[item 1, item2, item3]";
String[] text_output = text.split(", |\\[|\\]");
for(String item:text_output)
    fileOutStream.write(("\n"+item).getBytes());

and the output I get is correct, with the difference that in the output array the first element is an empty string. What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

You have requested to split the string at [ and ] so the system obeys and considers the empty space preceding the [ to be your first element. There are many ways in which you can proceed:

1. use text.replaceAll("\\[|\\]", "") before splitting;
2. hardcode the elimination of the first and last char before splitting: text.substring(1, text.length()-1);

3. use a positive match instead of negative one:

   Pattern.compile("[^,\\[\\]]+").matcher().find()