IS SPACE A VALID DELIMITER?

[ZEESHAN AZIZ]

I WANT TO READ A TEXT FILE, AND INTEND TO USE SPACE AS A DELIMITER. IT IS NOT WORKING OUT, AND COMPILER IS NOT RECOGNISING SPACE AS A DELIMITER.
I WONDERED WHETHER SPACE IS A VALID DELIMITER.

[Jose Botella]

JLS 3.2:
" 1. A translation of Unicode escapes (�3.3) in the raw stream of Unicode characters to the corresponding Unicode character. A Unicode escape of the form \uxxxx, where xxxx is a hexadecimal value, represents the Unicode character whose encoding is xxxx. This translation step allows any program to be expressed using only ASCII characters.
2. A translation of the Unicode stream resulting from step 1 into a stream of input characters and line terminators (�3.4).
3. A translation of the stream of input characters and line terminators resulting from step 2 into a sequence of input elements (�3.5) which, after white space (�3.6) and comments (�3.7) are discarded, comprise the tokens (�3.5) that are the terminal symbols of the syntactic grammar (�2.3).
"
JLS 3.6:
"
White space is defined as the ASCII space, horizontal tab, and form feed characters, as well as line terminators.
"

How are you using them?
Have you tried the StringTokenizer class to get the words?

[Guoqiao Sun]

Hi, Zeeshan, the following code might be useful to you:

package org.jboss.docs.cmp.cd.utils;
import java.util.Vector;
/**
 * This simple class has one method that tokenizes a string, but allows tokens
 * to be blanks. This is in contrast to the java.util.StringTokenizer class
 * that assumes that multiple delimiters are a single delimiter. This class is
 * designed to tokenize the output of spreadsheets, where not all cells have
 * entries
 */
public class TokenizerWithBlanks
{
   /**
    * Tokenize the string `s' with the specified delimiter, returning the
    * tokens as an array of strings
    */
   public static String[] tokenize (String _input, char delimiter)
{
   Vector v = new Vector();
   String input = new String (_input);
   String token;
   int pos;
   do
{
   pos = input.indexOf(delimiter);
   if (pos >= 0)
{
   token = input.substring(0, pos);
   input = input.substring(pos + 1);
}
   else
{
   token = input;
   input = "";
}
   v.add(token);
} while (pos >= 0);
     String s[] = new String[v.size()];
      for (int i = 0; i < v.size(); i++)
         s[i] = (String)v.get(i);
   return s;
}
}

Hope it helps,

------------------
Guoqiao Sun
Sun Certified Programmer for Java™ 2 Platform
try my mock exam¹²³ at my homepage.