How can I split a string into words, spaces and newlines?

Question

I'm using the Play Framework and taking a text from a textarea and I want to split it into an array of the words, spaces and newlines that was entered.

Hello World How

Are You

Would be something like

a[0] = "Hello";
a[1] = " ";
a[2] = "World";
a[3] = " ";
a[4] = "How";
a[5] = "\n";
a[6] = "Are";
a[7] = " ";
a[8] = "You";

If there is a simple regex way or something similar I would love to hear about it?

This seems like a duplicate of http://stackoverflow.com/questions/275768/is-there-a-way-to-split-strings-with-string-split-and-include-the-delimiters — worpet, Apr 13 '11 at 01:55

anubhava · Answer 1 · 2011-04-13T02:12:18.047

6

Try this code:

String str = "Hello World How\nAre You";
String[] inputs = str.split("(?!^)\\b");
for (int i=0; i<inputs.length; i++) {
   System.out.println("a[" + i + "] = \"" + inputs[i] + '"');
}

OUTPUT:
a[0] = "Hello"
a[1] = " "
a[2] = "World"
a[3] = " "
a[4] = "How"
a[5] = "
"
a[6] = "Are"
a[7] = " "
a[8] = "You"

edited Apr 13 '11 at 02:12

answered Apr 13 '11 at 01:59

anubhava

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score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered Apr 13 '11 at 02:03

3

st = new java.util.StringTokenizer (text, "[ \t\n]", true)

answered Apr 13 '11 at 02:03

user unknown

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@Ólafur Waage: *StringTokenizer is a legacy class that is retained for compatibility reasons although its use is **discouraged** in new code. It is recommended that anyone seeking this functionality use the split method of String or the java.util.regex package instead.* From Javadocs: http://download.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/util/StringTokenizer.html – anubhava Apr 13 '11 at 11:56

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Apr 13 '11 at 02:00

0

StringTokenizer would work.

answered Apr 13 '11 at 02:00

Val

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How can I split a string into words, spaces and newlines?

3 Answers3