Split multiple delimiters in Java

Question

How I can split the sentences with respect to the delimiters in the string and count the frequency of words ?

 String delimiters = "\t,;.?!-:@[](){}_*/";

My text file is:

Billy_Reeves

Smorz

Nationalist_Left_-_Youth

Ancient_Greek_units_of_measurement

Jiuting_(Shanghai_Metro)

Blodgett,_MO

Baekjeong

Matt_Brinkman

National_Vietnam_Veterans_Art_Museum

score 13 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 12:26

13

Try with

split("\\t|,|;|\\.|\\?|!|-|:|@|\\[|\\]|\\(|\\)|\\{|\\}|_|\\*|/");

Also

Use String.split() with multiple delimiters

edited May 23 '17 at 12:26

Community

1
1

answered Dec 20 '16 at 17:17

AMB

995
1
12
26

You seems to know that `split` takes regex, but forgot that some characters in regex are special and may require escaping. In current form this code will throw PatternSyntaxException since it is not properly created regex. – Pshemo Dec 21 '16 at 19:07
Fixed now @Pshemo – AMB Dec 22 '16 at 09:54

score 3 · Answer 2 · edited Dec 21 '16 at 19:08

The split method takes as argument a regular expression so, to use multiple delimiters, you need to input a regular expression separated by the OR regex operator or using a character class (only if the delimiters are single characters).

Using the OR operator:

String delimiters = "\\t|,|;|\\.|\\?|!|-|:|@|\\[|\\]|\\(|\\)|\\{|\\}|_|\\*|/";

Using the character class:

String delimiters = "[-\\t,;.?!:@\\[\\](){}_*/]";

As you can see some of the characters must be escaped as they are regex metacharacters.

Split multiple delimiters in Java

2 Answers2