How to split the string with slash correctly

Bing Zhao :

Code:

String line = "/abc/1/";
String[] tokens = line.split("/");

I want to get {"", "abc", "1", ""}.

However, the actual output is {"", "abc", "1"}.

What confuses me is why there is only one "", maybe there is something wrong with line.split("/").

Tim Biegeleisen :

Use the not-often-used second parameter of String#split:

String line = "/abc/1/";
String[] tokens = line.split("/", -1);

This returns {"", "abc", "1", ""}.

Demo

From the documentation for String#split(String pattern, int n):

If n is non-positive then the pattern will be applied as many times as possible and the array can have any length