How to Split a String in Java

When you have a string, sometimes you want to be able to split into an array of smaller pieces.

This is most commonly done with a delimiter, such as a comma.

In this post, we'll learn how to split a string in Java using a delimiter of your choice.

How to split a string in Java

To start off, let's begin with a comma-separated string.

JAVA
String string = "apples,oranges,bananas";

Now we can use the built-in method on the String class called split to split the string into an array of strings.

This method takes a single argument, which is the delimiter to split the string on.

Let's use the split method with a comma as the delimiter.

JAVA
String string = "apples,oranges,bananas";
String[] stringArray = string.split(",");

for (String s : stringArray) {
    System.out.println(s);
}

BASH
apples
oranges
bananas

The second parameter is the limit, which you can use to limit the number of elements in the array.

Let's try our earlier example with a limit of 2:

JAVA
String string = "apples,oranges,bananas";
String[] stringArray = string.split(",", 2);

for (String s : stringArray) {
    System.out.println(s);
}

BASH
apples
oranges,bananas

Instead of returning an array of length 3, we only have an array of length 2 because we limited the number of elements to 2.

Conclusion

In this post, we learned how to split a string in Java using a delimiter of your choosing.

Simply use the split method and pass it your delimiter and an optional limit, and you'll get back an array of strings.

Thanks for reading!

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