help required with split method of String class

[Bilal Ali]

Dear All,
We have a requirement that the user enters some decimal number like 123.345 or 12.0987 , now we want to break the real part and fractional part of the string , like for example when 123.345 is breaked it becomes "123" and "345" . I am using split method of the string class to break the real part and the fractional part. I am doing is follows:

String st = "231.23";
String arrayAfterSplitting[] = st.split(".");

the resultant array should be having 2 indexes but the array obtained after splitting is empty which means that it found no "." , am I making any mistake , please guide us that what to do.

Regards,
Bilal Ali.

[vijay mahendra]

hi ,
you need to try as

 
 
ArrayList al = String.split("\.");
 

   

"." default operator ,so we should use escape character before that.
Now it will work

Thanks,
Vijay

[Bilal Ali]

Dear Friend,
Thanks for your reply however whenever I used your tecqnique "\." I am getting compile time error that "illegal escape character" , can you please help.

[Abdul Mohsin]

Hi ,

Use \\. in place of \.

[Bill Shirley]

To explain:

the . is a special character in regex that matches any single character, thus your empty array

the '\.' will tell the regex to escape that behavior and actually match the .

but within a java string, the \ is an escape character as well, so to get a \ in the string so that it is passed to regex (from within split) we need to escape, yet again, the \\ will give us the \ in the string, thus

"\\." will be compiled into "/." which will be interpreted as "."