Question

I’m looking for a simpler solution. I’m new to Java and I need a little help. I’m trying to split String to String[] by this ‘],[‘. The problem is that Java tries to get these like a Regex and I don’t want to use it because I’m not good enough in it. I want just to split the string by these 3 characters “],[“;
Here is my code:

String usefulData = ...;
String[] list = null;
String token = "],[";
list = usefulData.split(token);

And here is the error ouput: Exception in thread “AWT-EventQueue-0” java.util.regex.PatternSyntaxException: Unclosed character class near index 2
],[… Please, any suggestions how to make this think works?

PS. Is there any other way to split the String? I don’t like this Regex very much. I have been used Qt and C# and in both places there is a way to escape from this Regular Expresions. Thanks a lot People!

Answer 1

You can build your String using Pattern#quote method.

That way you won’t have to escape your special characters with a backslash. Pattern.quote makes all your special characters in string behave like String literal: –

String usefulData = "[a],[b],[c,d]";
String token = Pattern.quote("],[");
String[] list = usefulData.split(token);

for (String val: list) {
    System.out.println(val.replaceAll("\\[|\\]", ""));
}

OUTPUT: –

a
b
c,d