Question

I’ve got strings in the form of:

/path/ /path\ with\ space/ /another/

I need to split this so I end up with an array containing:

[ /path/, /path with space/, /another/ ]

Is there an easy regex that would take care of this? Previously I was using \s+ but obviously that doesn’t work here.

Answer 1

Use a negative lookbehind.

String s = "/path/ /path\\ with\\ space/ /another/";
String[] parts = s.split("(?<!\\\\)\\s+");

System.out.println(Arrays.toString(parts));
// prints [/path/, /path\ with\ space/, /another/]

Note that the second element still contains \s, which you’ll need to strip out yourself.

for (int i=0; i<parts.length; i++)
{
    parts[i] = parts[i].replaceAll("\\\\ ", " ");
}

System.out.println(Arrays.toString(parts));
// prints [/path/, /path with space/, /another/]

Yes, that’s four \s just to match a single one in the string.