Question

Is there anyway we can directly access a certain(lets say 20th) element in a stringTokenizer. Every now and then I need only a certain element from it and do not need others, yet I have to traverse through all elements.

EDIT: I also want to ignore empty elements.

Am I missing something?

Answer 1

You could try Apache Commons Lang’s StringUtils class, which can split a string while ignoring empty elements and handling null strings for you.

A tokenizer would have to read at least n tokens in order to determine which is the n-th one. Thus it might be easier to just create a string array using String#split() or StringUtils.split(...).

Note that I’d prefer StringUtils.split(...) since it doesn’t return empty elements if I don’t want them, i.e. StringUtils.split(",a,b,c;;d,e,,f",";,"); would return ["a","b","c","d","e","f"] whereas String#split() would return ["","a","b","c","","d","e","","f"]