Efficient text manipulation...

[Tomer Gal]

If I got a String or a StringBuffer for example :
StringBuffer s = new StringBuffer();

s = "Hello World! Whats up?";

What is an efficient way to get the 1st word ("Hello") - save it and then to cut it from the string so all that is left is : " World! Whats up?"

Thanks for the help in advanced guys

[David Ulicny]

Use StringTokenizer or split() method.

[Joel McNary]

Depends on how the splitting si to be acheived -- the split() could be very annoying. If we assume that words are separated by spaces, then a simple indexOf(' ') and then substring would work nicely:

int index = aSentence.indexOf(' ');
String firstWord = aSentence;
String restOfSentence = null;
if(index > -1){
    firstWord = aSentence.substring(0, index);
    restOfSentence = aSentence.substring(index);
}

[David Harkness]

My take was that the main question was how to remove "Hello" .. not just get that string.

StringBuffer buf = new StringBuffer("Hello World! Whats up?");
int index = buf.indexOf(" ");
String hello = null;
if ( index > -1 ) {
    hello = buf.substring(0, index);
    buf.delete(0, index);
}

StringBuffer.delete() will result in an array copy to shift the text after the removed portion.