[java] Split string into individual words Java

I would like to know how to split up a large string into a series of smaller strings or words. For example:

I want to walk my dog.

I want to have a string: "I", another string:"want", etc.

How would I do this?

This question is related to java

The answer is


To include any separators between words (like everything except all lower case and upper case letters), we can do:

String mystring = "hi, there,hi Leo";
String[] arr = mystring.split("[^a-zA-Z]+");
for(int i = 0; i < arr.length; i += 1)
{
     System.out.println(arr[i]);
}

Here the regex means that the separators will be anything that is not a upper or lower case letter [^a-zA-Z], in groups of at least one [+].


You can use split(" ") method of the String class and can get each word as code given below:

String s = "I want to walk my dog";
String []strArray=s.split(" ");
for(int i=0; i<strArray.length;i++) {
     System.out.println(strArray[i]);
}

This regex will split word by space like space, tab, line break:

String[] str = s.split("\\s+");

Yet another method, using StringTokenizer :

String s = "I want to walk my dog";
StringTokenizer tokenizer = new StringTokenizer(s);

while(tokenizer.hasMoreTokens()) {
    System.out.println(tokenizer.nextToken());
}

you can use Apache commons' StringUtils class

    String[] partsOfString = StringUtils.split("I want to walk my dog",StringUtils.SPACE)

As a more general solution (but ASCII only!), to include any other separators between words (like commas and semicolons), I suggest:

String s = "I want to walk my dog, cat, and tarantula; maybe even my tortoise.";
String[] words = s.split("\\W+");

The regex means that the delimiters will be anything that is not a word [\W], in groups of at least one [+]. Because [+] is greedy, it will take for instance ';' and ' ' together as one delimiter.


See my other answer if your phrase contains accentuated characters :

String[] listeMots = phrase.split("\\P{L}+");

StringTokenizer separate = new StringTokenizer(s, " ");
String word = separate.nextToken();
System.out.println(word);

A regex can also be used to split words.

\w can be used to match word characters ([A-Za-z0-9_]), so that punctuation is removed from the results:

String s = "I want to walk my dog, and why not?";
Pattern pattern = Pattern.compile("\\w+");
Matcher matcher = pattern.matcher(s);
while (matcher.find()) {
    System.out.println(matcher.group());
}

Outputs:

I
want
to
walk
my
dog
and
why
not

See Java API documentation for Pattern


String[] str = s.split("[^a-zA-Z]+");

Use split()

String words[] = stringInstance.split(" ");