Split a String on | (pipe) in Java

java, regex, split, string

Solution

`|` is a special symbol in regular expression. Use `\\|` instead.

I'll explain why I appended 2 slashes. To escape the `|`, I need `\|`. However, to represent the string `\|`, `"\\|"` is required because `\` itself needs to be escaped in a string lateral.

And, as xagyg has pointed out in the comment, split will treat the parameter as a regular expression. It will not be treated as a plain string.

In this use case, you may be interested to learn about Pattern.quote. You can do `Pattern.quote("|")`. This way, none of the characters will be treated as special ones.

Problem

Original source

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