String's split()

Hi all,
Any help would be appreciated.
My question concerns the split method in the String class.
Let's pretend I have a sequence of Strings in a text file that are tabbed delimited. And some of the Strings are simply empty but are still delimited by a tab. For example, Hello [tab] how [tab] [tab] you [tab] ? (Obviously this person is a foreigner with bad grammar and forgot "are".) After reading this line in and converting it to a String object, I use the split method. My question is this: how does the split method handle the blank/empty string? What character data does it return? Because when I try to print the bytes of this, no bytes are printed.
I have some follow up questions, but I'll wait for some answsers first.

Thanks!

Can you show us the code that did not work?

Chris, the split method returns an empty String. This probably means that no bytes are associated with the byte array within the String ( getBytes() returns a "new byte[0]" )
Jamie

You might want to try split("\t+"). This will treat multiple consecutive tabs as a single delimiter, and so the blank field will be skipped entirely. IF that's what you really want - quite possibly, it's not.