Question

So I have a string:

String myString = "[tab][space]this[space][tab]is[space]a[space][tab]string";
String[] mySplit = myString.split("\\s+");

System.out.println(mySplit.length);
for (String s : mySplit) 
    System.out.println(s);  

Gives me:

5
[whitespace] 
this
is
a
string

Why is this and how do I stop that first position from being filled with whitespace?

Answer 1

The way split() is defined, if the input string starts with the delimiter then the first returned segment will be empty. This might be a little counter-intuitive, but consider

String value = ",a,b,c";
String[] fields = value.split(",");

You would want to get back four elements.

If you need to remove leading whitespace then use trim() first.