Question

I have this

String str = "a,pnp,a|pnp,lab2|pnp,a|pnp,lab2,utr,utr";
String[] strings = str.split("|");

This code won’t split around the ‘|’ character, instead it splits every character like

strings[0] == "a";
strings[1] == ",";

and so on.

How to get this working to get

strings[0] == "a,pnp,a"
strings[1] == "pnp,lab2"
...

Answer 1

split() takes a regular expression, and | is reserved for regex OR, so you need to escape it:

String[] strings = str.split("\\|");

or even better:

String[] strings = str.split(Pattern.quote("|"));