How Can I Split a String in Java Using Regular Expressions to Handle Whitespace?

How to Split a String Using Java Regular Expressions

When faced with the task of splitting a string into an array of substrings, developers often encounter the need to consider whitespace characters as potential delimiters. This can be done effectively using Java's String.split() method with the appropriate regular expression pattern.

To achieve this, the recommended pattern to pass to String.split() is "s ". This pattern groups all whitespace characters, including spaces (' '), tabs ('t'), and newlines ('n'), as a single delimiter.

For example, consider the string "Hellospace characterWorld". Splitting this string using the "s " pattern would yield the array ["Hello", "World"], eliminating the empty space between the space and tab characters.

It's important to note that in Java, the backslash character ("") needs to be escaped with an additional "", making the final pattern "$\s $". This is because Java first interprets the "s" as a special character escape sequence, so it's necessary to send the literal "s" by using "$$s$".

Alternatively, the s pattern is equivalent to the more detailed pattern "[ \tnx0Bfr]", which explicitly lists the characters it matches: space, tab, newline, line separator, form feed, and carriage return.

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