— Scott McNealy, Sun Microsystems Chairman, President and ceo

458
 
chapter 14
parsing Strings with
 split()
Parsing with String split()
Imagine you have a fl ashcard like this:
What is blue + yellow?
green
question
answer
What is blue + yellow?/green
What is red + blue?/purple
Saved in a question fi le like this:
How do you separate the question and answer?
When you read the fi le, the question and answer are smooshed 
together in one line, separated by a forward slash “/” (because 
that’s how we wrote the fi le in the QuizCardBuilder code).
String split() lets you break a String into pieces.
The split() method says, “give me a separator, and I’ll break out all 
the pieces of this String for you and put them in a String array.”
token 1
token 2
separator
String toTest = “What is blue + yellow?/green”;
String[] result = toTest.split(“/”);
for (String token:result) {
System.out.println(token);
}
In the QuizCardPlayer app, this 
is what a single line looks like 
when it’s read in from the file.
Loop through the array and print each token 
(piece). In this example, there are only two 
tokens: “What is blue + yellow?” and “green”.
The split() method takes the “/” and uses it to 
break apart the String into (in this case) two 
pieces. (Note: split() is FAR more powerful than 
what we’re using it for here. It can do extremely 
complex parsing with filters, wildcards, etc.)

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serialization 
and
file I/O
you are here
4
459
there are no
Dumb Questions
Q:
OK, I look in the API and there are about fi ve 
million classes in the java.io package. How the heck do