Question

I’m trying to work out a way of splitting up a string in java that follows a pattern like so:

String a = "123abc345def";

The results from this should be the following:

x[0] = "123";
x[1] = "abc";
x[2] = "345";
x[3] = "def";

However I’m completely stumped as to how I can achieve this. Please can someone help me out? I have tried searching online for a similar problem, however it’s very difficult to phrase it correctly in a search.

Please note: The number of letters & numbers may vary (e.g. There could be a string like so ‘1234a5bcdef’)

Answer 1

You could try to split on (?<=\D)(?=\d)|(?<=\d)(?=\D), like:

str.split("(?<=\\D)(?=\\d)|(?<=\\d)(?=\\D)");

It matches positions between a number and not-a-number (in any order).

• (?<=\D)(?=\d) – matches a position between a non-digit (\D) and a digit (\d)
• (?<=\d)(?=\D) – matches a position between a digit and a non-digit.