Question

In my properties file I have one property, which contains a comma separated list of values

In my code, I would like to load that property in, split it from the commas, and add each value into an array. I also want to make sure I don’t have values in the array due to whitespace etc

example property :

prop_allowed_extensions = .jpeg,tiff, .txt 

I have come up with this so far, but it feels dirty, is there a more elegant solution?

String test = classProperties.getProperty("prop_allowed_extensions", "txt, jpeg");
String[] splitString = StringUtils.split(test, ',');
String[] newString = new String[splitString.length];             
for (int i = 0; i < splitString.length; i++)
{
   newString[i] = StringUtils.trim(splitString[i]);                
}

I just want the text of the file extension, would it be appropriate to use a regular expression to remove whitespace/non-letters?

Answer 1

You can do it in two steps:

String[] allowedExtensions = str.replaceAll("[^\\w,_]", "").split(",")

(First kill anything that is not either a comma, an underscore or a word character (letter or digit), then split the resulting string