Splitting a Java String by the pipe symbol using split(“|”)

Question

The Java official documentation states:

The string \"boo:and:foo\", for example, yields the following results with these expressions Regex Result :

Answer 1

Use proper escaping: string.split("\\|")

Or, in Java 5+, use the helper Pattern.quote() which has been created for exactly this purpose:

string.split(Pattern.quote("|"))

which works with arbitrary input strings. Very useful when you need to quote / escape user input.