How to split a string, but also keep the delimiters?

Question

I have a multiline string which is delimited by a set of different delimiters:

(Text1)(DelimiterA)(Text2)(DelimiterC)(Text3)(DelimiterB)(Text4)

Answer 1

I had a look at the above answers and honestly none of them I find satisfactory. What you want to do is essentially mimic the Perl split functionality. Why Java doesn't allow this and have a join() method somewhere is beyond me but I digress. You don't even need a class for this really. Its just a function. Run this sample program:

Some of the earlier answers have excessive null-checking, which I recently wrote a response to a question here:

https://stackoverflow.com/users/18393/cletus

Anyway, the code:

public class Split {
    public static List split(String s, String pattern) {
        assert s != null;
        assert pattern != null;
        return split(s, Pattern.compile(pattern));
    }

    public static List split(String s, Pattern pattern) {
        assert s != null;
        assert pattern != null;
        Matcher m = pattern.matcher(s);
        List ret = new ArrayList();
        int start = 0;
        while (m.find()) {
            ret.add(s.substring(start, m.start()));
            ret.add(m.group());
            start = m.end();
        }
        ret.add(start >= s.length() ? "" : s.substring(start));
        return ret;
    }

    private static void testSplit(String s, String pattern) {
        System.out.printf("Splitting '%s' with pattern '%s'%n", s, pattern);
        List tokens = split(s, pattern);
        System.out.printf("Found %d matches%n", tokens.size());
        int i = 0;
        for (String token : tokens) {
            System.out.printf("  %d/%d: '%s'%n", ++i, tokens.size(), token);
        }
        System.out.println();
    }

    public static void main(String args[]) {
        testSplit("abcdefghij", "z"); // "abcdefghij"
        testSplit("abcdefghij", "f"); // "abcde", "f", "ghi"
        testSplit("abcdefghij", "j"); // "abcdefghi", "j", ""
        testSplit("abcdefghij", "a"); // "", "a", "bcdefghij"
        testSplit("abcdefghij", "[bdfh]"); // "a", "b", "c", "d", "e", "f", "g", "h", "ij"
    }
}