Split string by new line symbol

Question

I'm trying to split lines in this file eng-pol.txt by new line symbol "\n" and it's simply not working... I've tried:

String[] words = strLine.split("\n");
System.out.println(Arrays.toString(words));
[abbot    abbot [ˈæbət] <N>\n opat]

String[] words = strLine.split("\\n");
System.out.println(Arrays.toString(words));
[abbot    abbot [ˈæbət] <N>\n opat]

String[] words = strLine.split("\\r|\r");
System.out.println(Arrays.toString(words));
[abbot    abbot [ˈæbət] <N>\n opat]

Even this:

String[] words = strLine.split(System.getProperty("line.separator"));
System.out.println(Arrays.toString(words));
[abbot    abbot [ˈæbət] <N>\n opat]

I'm reading the file using BufferedReader and readLine method.

But it's not. I've tried all the solutions from there and none of them is working — bartektartanus, Jul 31 '14 at 20:36

Pshemo · Accepted Answer · 2015-01-27T12:34:14.507

9

I'm not sure if I understand you correctly but I see that your file contains \n literals (not actual line breaks). If you want to split on them then you need to write split as

split("\\\\n")

Regex which represents \ literal looks like \\ (it needs to be escaped, otherwise single \ will be treated for example as start of predefined character class like \d which represents digits).

But String which will represents such regex \\ need to be written as "\\\\" because in string \ is also special and it also needs to be escaped.

In short to match \ with regex you need to escape it in two levels:

in regex \\
in String "\\\\".

edited Jan 27 '15 at 12:34

answered Jul 31 '14 at 20:37

Pshemo

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That solution finally worked :) Thaks! – bartektartanus Jul 31 '14 at 20:39
2

@Pshemo if you have time can you explain why this works? – working Jul 31 '14 at 20:39

Split string by new line symbol

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