Split string to equal length substrings in Java

Question

How to split the string "Thequickbrownfoxjumps" to substrings of equal size in Java. Eg. "Thequickbrownfoxjumps" of 4 equal size should give the output.

["Theq","uick","brow","nfox","jump","s"]

Similar Question:

Split string into equal-length substrings in Scala

Answer 1

    import static java.lang.System.exit;
   import java.util.Scanner;
   import Java.util.Arrays.*;


 public class string123 {

public static void main(String[] args) {


  Scanner sc=new Scanner(System.in);
    System.out.println("Enter String");
    String r=sc.nextLine();
    String[] s=new String[10];
    int len=r.length();
       System.out.println("Enter length Of Sub-string");
    int l=sc.nextInt();
    int last;
    int f=0;
    for(int i=0;;i++){
        last=(f+l);
            if((last)>=len) last=len;
        s[i]=r.substring(f,last);
     // System.out.println(s[i]);

      if (last==len)break;
       f=(f+l);
    } 
    System.out.print(Arrays.tostring(s));
    }}

Result

 Enter String
 Thequickbrownfoxjumps
 Enter length Of Sub-string
 4

 ["Theq","uick","brow","nfox","jump","s"]

Answer 2

In case you want to split the string equally backwards, i.e. from right to left, for example, to split 1010001111 to [10, 1000, 1111], here's the code:

/**
 * @param s         the string to be split
 * @param subLen    length of the equal-length substrings.
 * @param backwards true if the splitting is from right to left, false otherwise
 * @return an array of equal-length substrings
 * @throws ArithmeticException: / by zero when subLen == 0
 */
public static String[] split(String s, int subLen, boolean backwards) {
    assert s != null;
    int groups = s.length() % subLen == 0 ? s.length() / subLen : s.length() / subLen + 1;
    String[] strs = new String[groups];
    if (backwards) {
        for (int i = 0; i < groups; i++) {
            int beginIndex = s.length() - subLen * (i + 1);
            int endIndex = beginIndex + subLen;
            if (beginIndex < 0)
                beginIndex = 0;
            strs[groups - i - 1] = s.substring(beginIndex, endIndex);
        }
    } else {
        for (int i = 0; i < groups; i++) {
            int beginIndex = subLen * i;
            int endIndex = beginIndex + subLen;
            if (endIndex > s.length())
                endIndex = s.length();
            strs[i] = s.substring(beginIndex, endIndex);
        }
    }
    return strs;
}

Answer 3

Here's the regex one-liner version:

System.out.println(Arrays.toString(
    "Thequickbrownfoxjumps".split("(?<=\\G.{4})")
));

\G is a zero-width assertion that matches the position where the previous match ended. If there was no previous match, it matches the beginning of the input, the same as \A. The enclosing lookbehind matches the position that's four characters along from the end of the last match.

Both lookbehind and \G are advanced regex features, not supported by all flavors. Furthermore, \G is not implemented consistently across the flavors that do support it. This trick will work (for example) in Java, Perl, .NET and JGSoft, but not in PHP (PCRE), Ruby 1.9+ or TextMate (both Oniguruma). JavaScript's /y (sticky flag) isn't as flexible as \G, and couldn't be used this way even if JS did support lookbehind.

I should mention that I don't necessarily recommend this solution if you have other options. The non-regex solutions in the other answers may be longer, but they're also self-documenting; this one's just about the opposite of that. ;)

Also, this doesn't work in Android, which doesn't support the use of \G in lookbehinds.

Answer 4

If you're using Google's guava general-purpose libraries (and quite honestly, any new Java project probably should be), this is insanely trivial with the Splitter class:

for (String substring : Splitter.fixedLength(4).split(inputString)) {
    doSomethingWith(substring);
}

and that's it. Easy as!

Answer 5

public static String[] split(String src, int len) {
    String[] result = new String[(int)Math.ceil((double)src.length()/(double)len)];
    for (int i=0; i<result.length; i++)
        result[i] = src.substring(i*len, Math.min(src.length(), (i+1)*len));
    return result;
}

Answer 6

Another brute force solution could be,

    String input = "thequickbrownfoxjumps";
    int n = input.length()/4;
    String[] num = new String[n];

    for(int i = 0, x=0, y=4; i<n; i++){
    num[i]  = input.substring(x,y);
    x += 4;
    y += 4;
    System.out.println(num[i]);
    }

Where the code just steps through the string with substrings