Separate data using java String.split() method

Question

I've been trying to use the String.split() method in the java programming language to retrieve data from a string. The data in my string is in a weird format. Let me give you an example: let's say I have the following string:

String s="My name is      :  John Smith         13   75,5";

I need to split the string in such a way that everything (except whitespaces) before : goes to a string, then, in what's left, everything (except whitespaces) before the first number to another string, then the first number to another string and the last number to another string, such that, considering the String s in my example I would have the following output:

My name is
John Smith
13
75,5

I tried the following code:

data= s.split("\\s*\\:\\s*|\\s+|\\s+");

But the output was:

My
name
is
John
Smith
13
75,5

I've tried many other regular expressions but with no success (I believe that proves how much of a beginner I am with regex...) Can somebody help me?

Note: I think it wouldn't be too difficult to write my own split method for my data and maybe it's much better in terms of performance but I would really like to understand how to do this using regex.

Answer 1

"\\s*\\:\\s*|\\s+|\\s+"

The | characters don't do what you think they might. They act as "or", so in your case your regex is matching \\s+ to the spaces between words, because while they don't match the first section of your regex, they certainly match the second (and third).

Better solution would be something like this:

"\\s*\\:\\s*|\\s{2,}"

Answer 2

If you want to keep single spaces, but split on 2+ spaces, the expression looks like this:

data= s.split("\\s*\\:\\s*|\\s{2,}");

This produces the output that you need (demo):

My name is
John Smith
13
75,5