String's split() method.

This will be short. Recently I had to use this simple String class method when developing a parser for some pdf documents. Everything was going well until one moment. In the document, among others I had to elicit a range value which was given in the format x..y (for instance, 1..32). After getting the string 1..32 I wanted to use split method to separate the bounds. So in the code it could look like this:

String range = "1..32";
String[] bounds = range.split("..");

But that didn't work! Why? The answer is very simple. The String's split method takes a regex expression as an argument! And in Java "." (a dot) in regex means any character. So that's why the returned array was empty! To solve it we have to use "\\" between any special regex character if we want it to be treated as a string character. So we should change the above code to:

String range = "1..32";
String[] bounds = range.split("\\.\\.");

That's simple! So remember: split's argument = regex expression! Wish all my readers remember this both on the exam and during the work with Java code.