Split string into individual words Java

Question

I would like to know how to split up a large string into a series of smaller strings or words. For example:

I want to walk my dog.

I want to have a string: "I", another string:"want", etc.

How would I do this?

Answer 1

Use split() method

Eg:

String s = "I want to walk my dog";
String[] arr = s.split(" ");    

for ( String ss : arr) {
    System.out.println(ss);
}

Answer 2

As a more general solution (but ASCII only!), to include any other separators between words (like commas and semicolons), I suggest:

String s = "I want to walk my dog, cat, and tarantula; maybe even my tortoise.";
String[] words = s.split("\\W+");

The regex means that the delimiters will be anything that is not a word [\W], in groups of at least one [+]. Because [+] is greedy, it will take for instance ';' and ' ' together as one delimiter.

Answer 3

A regex can also be used to split words.

\w can be used to match word characters ([A-Za-z0-9_]), so that punctuation is removed from the results:

String s = "I want to walk my dog, and why not?";
Pattern pattern = Pattern.compile("\\w+");
Matcher matcher = pattern.matcher(s);
while (matcher.find()) {
    System.out.println(matcher.group());
}

Outputs:

I
want
to
walk
my
dog
and
why
not

See Java API documentation for Pattern

Answer 4

See my other answer if your phrase contains accentuated characters :

String[] listeMots = phrase.split("\\P{L}+");

Answer 5

Yet another method, using StringTokenizer :

String s = "I want to walk my dog";
StringTokenizer tokenizer = new StringTokenizer(s);

while(tokenizer.hasMoreTokens()) {
    System.out.println(tokenizer.nextToken());
}

Answer 6

To include any separators between words (like everything except all lower case and upper case letters), we can do:

String mystring = "hi, there,hi Leo";
String[] arr = mystring.split("[^a-zA-Z]+");
for(int i = 0; i < arr.length; i += 1)
{
     System.out.println(arr[i]);
}

Here the regex means that the separators will be anything that is not a upper or lower case letter [^a-zA-Z], in groups of at least one [+].

Answer 7

You can use split(" ") method of the String class and can get each word as code given below:

String s = "I want to walk my dog";
String []strArray=s.split(" ");
for(int i=0; i<strArray.length;i++) {
     System.out.println(strArray[i]);
}

Answer 8

This regex will split word by space like space, tab, line break:

String[] str = s.split("\\s+");

Answer 9

Use split()

String words[] = stringInstance.split(" ");

Answer 10

you can use Apache commons' StringUtils class

String[] partsOfString = StringUtils.split("I want to walk my dog", StringUtils.SPACE)

Answer 11

StringTokenizer separate = new StringTokenizer(s, " ");
String word = separate.nextToken();
System.out.println(word);

Answer 12

Java String split() method example

 public class SplitExample{  
        public static void main(String args[]){  
            String str="java string split method";  
            String[] words=str.split("\\s");//splits the string based on whitespace  
     
            for(String word:words){  
                System.out.println(word);  
            }  
        }
    }

Answer 13

class test{
           
    public static void main(String[] args){
                StringTokenizer st= new StringTokenizer("I want to walk my dog.");
                
                while (st.hasMoreTokens())
                    System.out.println(st.nextToken());
         
            }
        }

Answer 14

Using Java Stream API:

String sentence = "I want to walk my dog.";

Arrays.stream(sentence.split(" ")).forEach(System.out::println);

Output:

I
want
to
walk
my
dog.

Or

String sentence2 = "I want to walk my dog.";

Arrays.stream(sentence2.split(" ")).map(str -> str.replace(".", "")).forEach(System.out::println);

Output:

I
want
to
walk
my
dog

Answer 15

String[] str = s.split("[^a-zA-Z]+");