Question

I’m trying to split a line of text into multiple parts. Each element of the text is separated by a period.
I’m using string.split(“.”); to split the text into an array of Strings, but not getting anywhere.

Here is a sample of the code:

String fileName = "testing.one.two";

String[] fileNameSplit = fileName.split(".");

System.out.println(fileNameSplit[0]);

The funny thing is, when I try “:” instead of “.”, it works? How can I get it to work for a period?

Answer 1

String.split() accepts a regular expression (regex for short) and dot is a special char in regexes. It means “match all chars except newlines”. So you must escape it with a leading backslash. But the leading backslash is a special character in java string literals. It denotes an escape sequence. So it must be escaped too, with another leading backslash. Like this:

fileName.split("\\.");