Splitting a String with the pipe symbol as delimiter

Question

Why is it that in the following, the output is [] and not [1]?

String input=\"1|2|3\";
String[] values= input.split(\"|\");
System.         


        

Answer 1

The split method receives a regex as a parameter. The pipe is a reserved character with its own purpose (it means or).

You can either escape it ("\\|") or, if you're in Java 1.5+ you can use Pattern.quote("|") like this:

input.split(Pattern.quote("|"));