Confused regarding split in Java

Question

I am trying to take a text from a file, and take the a's and b's out using split function.

        String inStr = in.readLine();

// for example "a1a1a1a1b"

        String lettersStr = letters.readLine();

// for example "ab"

Then i'm doing this trying to split all the letters i want. Why is this not working?

        String outFinal = "\"\\\\s*["+ lettersStr +"]\\\\s*\"";
        String[] inSplit = inStr.split(outFinal);

What i'm trying to accomplish is

        inStr.split("\\s*[ab]\\s*"));

Which works fine but the problem is that since i'm using a BufferedReader (fileread) the letters to cut out keep changing, hence why i can't just use the line above.

Thanks in advance Regards

Answer 1

Change

String outFinal = "\"\\\\s*["+ lettersStr +"]\\\\s*\"";

to

String outFinal = "\\s*["+ lettersStr +"]\\s*";