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Asked: 2026-05-25T22:53:24+00:00

I need help to understand regex. For some reason, i’v read lots of tutorials

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I need help to understand regex. For some reason, i’v read lots of tutorials and lots of questions here on sof, and cannot manage to understand it. I want to use String.split function like in here: Java string.split – by multiple character delimiter. But i cant understand this part:

String[] parts = input.split("[,\\s\\-:\\?]");

Lets supose i want to make a split with this following delimiters: ” ” (space), “.” (full stop), “,” (coma), “!”, “»”, “«”, etc. How can i get this with regex? I want understand what this characters in here: (“[,\s\-:\?]”) are. What does “\s”, why is it needed.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    \s is “any single whitespace character”. So it represents a space, newline, tab, or other such.

    Note that the regex could actually be written more compactly in this case:

    String[] parts = input.split("[,\\s:?-]");

    (? doesn’t need to be escaped when inside [], and - doesn’t either if it’s the last thing.)

    For more details about character classes, see http://www.regular-expressions.info/charclass.html

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