So the idea here is that I'm taking a .csv into a string and each value needs to be stored into a variable. I am unsure how to properly parse a string to do this.
My idea is a function that looks like
final char delim = ',';
int nextItem(String data, int startFrom) {
if (data.charAt(startFrom) != delim) {
return data.charAt(startFrom)
} else {
return nextItem(data, startFrom + 1);
}
}
so if I passed it something like
nextItem("45,621,9", 0);
it would return 45
and if I passed it
nextItem("45,621,9", 3);
it would return 621
I'm not sure if I have that setup properly to be recursive, but I could also use a For loop I suppose, only real stipulation is I can't use the Substring method.
Please don't use recursion for a matter that can be easily done iteratively. Recursion is expensive in terms of stack and calling frames: A very long string could produce a StackOverflowError.
I suggest you take a look to standard method indexOf of java.lang.String
:
A good alternative is Regular Expressions.
You can seperate the words considering comma ',' as delimeter
Code
String[] nextItem(String data) {
String[] words=data.split(",");
return words;
}
This will return an array of strings that is the words in your input string. Then you can use the array in anyway you need.
Hope it helps ;)
Processing comes with a split()
function that does exactly what you're describing.
From the reference:
String men = "Chernenko,Andropov,Brezhnev";
String[] list = split(men, ',');
// list[0] is now "Chernenko", list[1] is "Andropov"...
Behind the scenes it's using the String#split()
function like H. Sodi's answer, but you should just use this function instead of defining your own.