Split string into individual words Java

Question

I would like to know how to split up a large string into a series of smaller strings or words. For example:

I want to walk my dog.

Answer 1

you can use Apache commons' StringUtils class

    String[] partsOfString = StringUtils.split("I want to walk my dog",StringUtils.SPACE)

Answer 2

A regex can also be used to split words.

\w can be used to match word characters ([A-Za-z0-9_]), so that punctuation is removed from the results:

String s = "I want to walk my dog, and why not?";
Pattern pattern = Pattern.compile("\\w+");
Matcher matcher = pattern.matcher(s);
while (matcher.find()) {
    System.out.println(matcher.group());
}

Outputs:

I
want
to
walk
my
dog
and
why
not

See Java API documentation for Pattern

Answer 3

See my other answer if your phrase contains accentuated characters :

String[] listeMots = phrase.split("\\P{L}+");

Answer 4

Use split() method

Eg:

String s = "I want to walk my dog";
String[] arr = s.split(" ");    

for ( String ss : arr) {
    System.out.println(ss);
}

Answer 5

To include any separators between words (like everything except all lower case and upper case letters), we can do:

String mystring = "hi, there,hi Leo";
String[] arr = mystring.split("[^a-zA-Z]+");
for(int i = 0; i < arr.length; i += 1)
{
     System.out.println(arr[i]);
}

Here the regex means that the separators will be anything that is not a upper or lower case letter [^a-zA-Z], in groups of at least one [+].

Answer 6

StringTokenizer separate = new StringTokenizer(s, " ");
String word = separate.nextToken();
System.out.println(word);