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Going by the suggestion provided here I tried using \\W as a delimiter for non word character in string.split function of java. 

String str = "id-INT, name-STRING,";

This looks like a really simple string. I wanted to extract just the words from this string. The length of the array that I get is 5 whereas it should be 4. There is an empty string at position right after INT. I don't understand why the space in there is not being considered as non word

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user3527975
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1 Answers1

8

The , and the space are been treated as separate entities, try using \\W+ instead

    String str = "id-INT, name-STRING,";
    String[] parts = str.split("\\W+");
    System.out.println(parts.length);
    System.out.println(Arrays.toString(parts));

Which outputs

4
[id, INT, name, STRING]
MadProgrammer
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  • I tried googling the significance of + sign here. Didn't get any. Could you please explain what did the + sign do? BTW : Thank you very much – user3527975 Mar 02 '15 at 03:59
  • From my (puny) understanding, it's grouping all the entities together, so rather than using the individual elements, it's group all the matches that occur simultaneously (`", "`) together into a single match – MadProgrammer Mar 02 '15 at 04:08