Question

Is it better to use regex or Stringtokenizer to separate the author and title in this string:

William Faulkner - 'Light In August'

Is this the simplest regex that would work?

Pattern pattern = Pattern.compile("^\\s*([^-]+)-.*$");
Matcher matcher = pattern.matcher("William Faulkner - 'Light In August'");
String author = matcher.group(1).trim();
String bookTitle = matcher.group(2).trim();

Is that overkill or is there a simpler way to do this with a Stringtokenizer?

Basically I’m looking for the most transparent and maintainable solution since I don’t have a good understanding of regex and got help with the one above.

Answer 1

It depends on what the input looks like. Your regex, for example, would fail on author names that contain a hyphen.

Perhaps something like

Pattern.compile("^\\s*(.*?)\\s+-\\s+'(.*)'\\s*$")

might fit a little better.