help req. regarding parsing a file and tokenising the contents

[Paul Andrew]

Hello.
Im fairly new to java, and need help to complete a task.

I need to read in a text file, and each line on it for errors and print out messages accordingly.

So far, reading the file is fine, but I need to split the lines into tokens. The lines are formatted as follows

surname:forename:1234:01-01-06

Im having trouble creating the tokens(split by : ) . Ive tried using stringtokenizer but to no avail. Are there any other ways of splitting the strings? (However, I cant use the regex items.)

Once tokenized, I intend to check the tokens like this...

public static void checkTokenOne() // Checks to see that the token contains a valid surname.
   {
       for (int i = 0; i < tokens[0].length(); i++)
       {
           if ((tokens[0].charAt(i) < 'A')||(tokens[0].charAt(i) >'Z' )||(tokens[0].charAt(i) >= 'a')||(tokens[0].charAt(i) <='z'))
           {
               System.out.println ("Error on line - " + line + " - Data regarding surname has value" + tokens [0]);
           }
       }
   }    

Sorry if i should have put this in another section of the forum..

Many thanks
[ March 24, 2006: Message edited by: Paul Andrew ]

[Garrett Rowe]

If you're using Java 1.5 you can use String.split();

String myString = "a:b:c:d";
String[] tokens = myString.split(":");

[ March 24, 2006: Message edited by: Garrett Rowe ]

[Jeanne Boyarsky]

Paul,
Welcome to JavaRanch!

StringTokenizer should work. Note that you need to pass ":" as the token. Passing ": " looks for colon or space.

You can call
String token = token.trim() on the token to get rid of the whitespace afterwards.

[Stuart Ash]

Originally posted by Garrett Rowe:
If you're using Java 1.5 you can use String.split();

String myString = "a:b:c :mrgreen: ";
String[] tokens = myString.split(":");

[ March 24, 2006: Message edited by: Garrett Rowe ]

Or if using older java, the same method is available in Jakarta Commons Lang StringUtils