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Azure Container Apps is a fully managed serverless container service that enables you to build and deploy modern, cloud-native Java applications and microservices at scale. It offers a simplified developer experience while providing the flexibility and portability of containers.

Of course, Azure Container Apps has really solid support for our ecosystem, from a number of build options, managed Java components, native metrics, dynamic logger, and quite a bit more.

To learn more about Java features on Azure Container Apps, visit the documentation page.

You can also ask questions and leave feedback on the Azure Container Apps GitHub page.

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Azure Container Apps is a fully managed serverless container service that enables you to build and deploy modern, cloud-native Java applications and microservices at scale. It offers a simplified developer experience while providing the flexibility and portability of containers.

Of course, Azure Container Apps has really solid support for our ecosystem, from a number of build options, managed Java components, native metrics, dynamic logger, and quite a bit more.

To learn more about Java features on Azure Container Apps, you can get started over on the documentation page.

And, you can also ask questions and leave feedback on the Azure Container Apps GitHub page.

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Modern software architecture is often broken. Slow delivery leads to missed opportunities, innovation is stalled due to architectural complexities, and engineering resources are exceedingly expensive.

Orkes is the leading workflow orchestration platform built to enable teams to transform the way they develop, connect, and deploy applications, microservices, AI agents, and more.

With Orkes Conductor managed through Orkes Cloud, developers can focus on building mission critical applications without worrying about infrastructure maintenance to meet goals and, simply put, taking new products live faster and reducing total cost of ownership.

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Modern software architecture is often broken. Slow delivery leads to missed opportunities, innovation is stalled due to architectural complexities, and engineering resources are exceedingly expensive.

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With Orkes Conductor managed through Orkes Cloud, developers can focus on building mission critical applications without worrying about infrastructure maintenance to meet goals and, simply put, taking new products live faster and reducing total cost of ownership.

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Since its introduction in Java 8, the Stream API has become a staple of Java development. The basic operations like iterating, filtering, mapping sequences of elements are deceptively simple to use.

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To get a better understanding on how Streams work and how to combine them with other language features, check out our guide to Java Streams:

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I built the security material as two full courses - Core and OAuth, to get practical with these more complex scenarios. We explore when and how to use each feature and code through it on the backing project.

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End-to-end testing is a very useful method to make sure that your application works as intended. This highlights issues in the overall functionality of the software, that the unit and integration test stages may miss.

Playwright is an easy-to-use, but powerful tool that automates end-to-end testing, and supports all modern browsers and platforms.

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1. Introduction

We all know that splitting a string is a very common task. However, we often split using just one delimiter.

In this tutorial, we’ll discuss in detail different options for splitting a string by multiple delimiters.

2. Splitting a Java String by Multiple Delimiters

In order to show how each of the solutions below performs splitting, we’ll use the same example string:

String example = "Mary;Thomas:Jane-Kate";
String[] expectedArray = new String[]{"Mary", "Thomas", "Jane", "Kate"};

2.1. Regex Solution

Programmers often use different regular expressions to define a search pattern for strings. They’re also a very popular solution when it comes to splitting a string. So, let’s see how we can use a regular expression to split a string by multiple delimiters in Java.

First, we don’t need to add a new dependency since regular expressions are available in the java.util.regex packageWe just have to define an input string we want to split and a pattern.

The next step is to apply a pattern. A pattern can match zero or multiple times. To split by different delimiters, we should just set all the characters in the pattern.

We’ll write a simple test to demonstrate this approach:

String[] names = example.split("[;:-]");
Assertions.assertEquals(4, names.length);
Assertions.assertArrayEquals(expectedArray, names);

We’ve defined a test string with names that should be split by characters in the pattern. The pattern itself contains a semicolon, a colon, and a hyphen. When applied to the example string, we’ll get four names in the array.

2.2. Guava Solution

Guava also offers a solution for splitting a string by multiple delimiters. Its solution is based on a Splitter class. This class extracts the substrings from an input string using the separator sequence. We can define this sequence in multiple ways:

  • as a single character
  • a fixed string
  • a regular expression
  • CharMatcher instance

Further on, the Splitter class has two methods for defining the delimiters. So, let’s test both of them.

Firstly, we’ll add the Guava dependency:

<dependency>
    <groupId>com.google.guava</groupId>
    <artifactId>guava</artifactId>
    <version>32.1.3-jre</version>
</dependency>

Then, we’ll start with the on method: public static Splitter on(Pattern separatorPattern)

It takes the pattern for defining the delimiters for splitting. First, we’ll define the combination of the delimiters and compile the pattern. After that, we can split the string.

In our example, we’ll use a regular expression to specify the delimiters:

Iterable<String> names = Splitter.on(Pattern.compile("[;:-]")).split(example);
Assertions.assertEquals(4, Iterators.size(names.iterator()));
Assertions.assertIterableEquals(Arrays.asList(expectedArray), names);

The other method is the onPattern method: public static Splitter onPattern(String separatorPattern)

The difference between this and the previous method is that the onPattern method takes the pattern as a string. There is no need to compile it like in the on method. We’ll define the same combination of the delimiters for testing the onPattern method:

Iterable<String> names = Splitter.onPattern("[;:-]").split(example);
Assertions.assertEquals(4, Iterators.size(names.iterator()));
Assertions.assertIterableEquals(Arrays.asList(expectedArray), names);

In both tests, we managed to split the string and get the array with four names.

Since we’re splitting an input string with multiple delimiters, we can also use the anyOf method in the CharMatcher class:

Iterable<String> names = Splitter.on(CharMatcher.anyOf(";:-")).split(example);
Assertions.assertEquals(4, Iterators.size(names.iterator()));
Assertions.assertIterableEquals(Arrays.asList(expectedArray), names);

This option comes only with the on method in the Splitter class. The outcome is the same as for the previous two tests.

2.3. Apache Commons Solution

The last option we’ll discuss is available in the Apache Commons Lang 3 library.

We’ll start by adding the Apache Commons Lang dependency to our pom.xml file:

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.apache.commons</groupId>
    <artifactId>commons-lang3</artifactId>
    <version>3.13.0</version>
</dependency>

Next, we’ll use the split method from the StringUtils class:

String[] names = StringUtils.split(example, ";:-");
Assertions.assertEquals(4, names.length);
Assertions.assertArrayEquals(expectedArray, names);

We only have to define all the characters we’ll use to split the string. Calling the split method will divide the example string into four names.

3. Conclusion

In this article, we’ve seen different options for splitting an input string by multiple delimiters. First, we discussed a solution based on regular expressions and plain Java. Later, we showed different options available in Guava. Finally, we wrapped up our examples with a solution based on the Apache Commons Lang 3 library.

The code backing this article is available on GitHub. Once you're logged in as a Baeldung Pro Member, start learning and coding on the project.
Baeldung Pro – NPI EA (cat = Baeldung)
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Baeldung Pro comes with both absolutely No-Ads as well as finally with Dark Mode, for a clean learning experience:

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Once the early-adopter seats are all used, the price will go up and stay at $33/year.

Partner – Microsoft – NPI EA (cat = Spring Boot)
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Azure Container Apps is a fully managed serverless container service that enables you to build and deploy modern, cloud-native Java applications and microservices at scale. It offers a simplified developer experience while providing the flexibility and portability of containers.

Of course, Azure Container Apps has really solid support for our ecosystem, from a number of build options, managed Java components, native metrics, dynamic logger, and quite a bit more.

To learn more about Java features on Azure Container Apps, visit the documentation page.

You can also ask questions and leave feedback on the Azure Container Apps GitHub page.

Partner – Orkes – NPI EA (cat = Spring)
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Modern software architecture is often broken. Slow delivery leads to missed opportunities, innovation is stalled due to architectural complexities, and engineering resources are exceedingly expensive.

Orkes is the leading workflow orchestration platform built to enable teams to transform the way they develop, connect, and deploy applications, microservices, AI agents, and more.

With Orkes Conductor managed through Orkes Cloud, developers can focus on building mission critical applications without worrying about infrastructure maintenance to meet goals and, simply put, taking new products live faster and reducing total cost of ownership.

Try a 14-Day Free Trial of Orkes Conductor today.

Partner – Orkes – NPI EA (tag = Microservices)
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Modern software architecture is often broken. Slow delivery leads to missed opportunities, innovation is stalled due to architectural complexities, and engineering resources are exceedingly expensive.

Orkes is the leading workflow orchestration platform built to enable teams to transform the way they develop, connect, and deploy applications, microservices, AI agents, and more.

With Orkes Conductor managed through Orkes Cloud, developers can focus on building mission critical applications without worrying about infrastructure maintenance to meet goals and, simply put, taking new products live faster and reducing total cost of ownership.

Try a 14-Day Free Trial of Orkes Conductor today.

eBook – HTTP Client – NPI EA (cat=HTTP Client-Side)
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The Apache HTTP Client is a very robust library, suitable for both simple and advanced use cases when testing HTTP endpoints. Check out our guide covering basic request and response handling, as well as security, cookies, timeouts, and more:

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eBook – Java Concurrency – NPI EA (cat=Java Concurrency)
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Handling concurrency in an application can be a tricky process with many potential pitfalls. A solid grasp of the fundamentals will go a long way to help minimize these issues.

Get started with understanding multi-threaded applications with our Java Concurrency guide:

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eBook – Java Streams – NPI EA (cat=Java Streams)
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Since its introduction in Java 8, the Stream API has become a staple of Java development. The basic operations like iterating, filtering, mapping sequences of elements are deceptively simple to use.

But these can also be overused and fall into some common pitfalls.

To get a better understanding on how Streams work and how to combine them with other language features, check out our guide to Java Streams:

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eBook Jackson – NPI EA – 3 (cat = Jackson)
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