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

@Test
public void regexSplit() {
    String source = "Thequickbrownfoxjumps";
    // define matcher, any char, min length 1, max length 4
    Matcher matcher = Pattern.compile(".{1,4}").matcher(source);
    List<String> result = new ArrayList<>();
    while (matcher.find()) {
        result.add(source.substring(matcher.start(), matcher.end()));
    }
    String[] expected = {"Theq", "uick", "brow", "nfox", "jump", "s"};
    assertArrayEquals(result.toArray(), expected);
}

Answer 2

Well, it's fairly easy to do this by brute force:

public static List<String> splitEqually(String text, int size) {
    // Give the list the right capacity to start with. You could use an array
    // instead if you wanted.
    List<String> ret = new ArrayList<String>((text.length() + size - 1) / size);

    for (int start = 0; start < text.length(); start += size) {
        ret.add(text.substring(start, Math.min(text.length(), start + size)));
    }
    return ret;
}

I don't think it's really worth using a regex for this.

EDIT: My reasoning for not using a regex:

• This doesn't use any of the real pattern matching of regexes. It's just counting.
• I suspect the above will be more efficient, although in most cases it won't matter
• If you need to use variable sizes in different places, you've either got repetition or a helper function to build the regex itself based on a parameter - ick.
• The regex provided in another answer firstly didn't compile (invalid escaping), and then didn't work. My code worked first time. That's more a testament to the usability of regexes vs plain code, IMO.

Answer 3

You can use substring from String.class (handling exceptions) or from Apache lang commons (it handles exceptions for you)

static String   substring(String str, int start, int end) 

Put it inside a loop and you are good to go.

Answer 4

i use the following java 8 solution:

public static List<String> splitString(final String string, final int chunkSize) {
  final int numberOfChunks = (string.length() + chunkSize - 1) / chunkSize;
  return IntStream.range(0, numberOfChunks)
                  .mapToObj(index -> string.substring(index * chunkSize, Math.min((index + 1) * chunkSize, string.length())))
                  .collect(toList());
}