Question

I would like to split the following string generated from a database resultset row.

Sample rows:

A) (74,”and there”,”is a car”,”in the”,”garage man”,t)

B) (17,account3,,,,t)

I want an output as follows (Pipe | to separate split elements):

A) 74 | and there | is a car | in the | garage man | t

B) 17 | account3 | | | | t

I want to zero length values to be stored as null in my application. This is my source code:

public void refreshSearchTable (ArrayList<String> newData){
        int noOfRows = newData.size();
        int noOfColumns = gui.getTableSearchResultHeader().length + 1;
        Object[][] tempList = new Object[noOfRows][noOfColumns];
        String rowResult = "";
        String delims = "[,()\"]+";
        String [] tokens;
        Object [] elements = newData.toArray();

        int j = 0;
        for (int i = 0; i < noOfRows; i++){
            rowResult = elements[i].toString();
            System.out.println("rowresult: " + rowResult);
            tokens = rowResult.split(delims, -1);
            for (String t : tokens){

                System.out.println("j: " + j + "t: " + t);

                if (j == 1){ ... }
                else if (j==2){ ... }
                                ...

                j++;
            }
            j=0;
        }
    }

“[,()\”]+” works fine for non-zero length values. I’m able to pick up the right sub-string according to index value j. I’ve read that passing a negative value to split(, ) will not discard the non-zero length values … but it does. What am i doing wrong?

Answer 1

Maybe you could try with .split("[()\"]*,{1}[()\"]*");

The expression user before [,()\"]+ will use as separator more than one comma or any other separator informed. For instance ,, will be consider one, so does [],[]. The expression commented above, expects that zero or more of the separators are followed with just one comma and this can be followed with zero or more separators too.