Why does .split(“\\”) generate an exception?

Question

I have a String representing a directory, where \\ is used to separate folders. I want to split based on \"\\\\\":

String address = \"C         


        

Answer 1

As others have suggested, you could use:

String[] separated = address.split("\\\\");

or you could use:

String[] separated = address.split(Pattern.quote("\\")); 

Also, for reference:

String address = "C:\saeed\test";

will not compile, since \s is not a valid escape sequence. Here \t is interpreted as the tab character, what you actually want is:

String address = "C:\\saeed\\test";

So, now we see that in order to get a \ in a String, we need "\\".

The regular expression \\ matches a single backslash since \ is a special character in regex, and hence must be escaped. Once we put this in quotes, aka turn it into a String, we need to escape each of the backslashes, yielding "\\\\".