You can split a [String](<https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/api/java/lang/String.html>) on a particular delimiting character or a Regular Expression, you can use the [String.split()](<https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/api/java/lang/String.html#split-java.lang.String->) method that has the following signature:

public String[] split(String regex)

Note that delimiting character or regular expression gets removed from the resulting String Array.

Example using delimiting character:

String lineFromCsvFile = "Mickey;Bolton;12345;121216";
String[] dataCells = lineFromCsvFile.split(";");
// Result is dataCells = { "Mickey", "Bolton", "12345", "121216"};

Example using regular expression:

String lineFromInput = "What    do you need    from me?";
String[] words = lineFromInput.split("\\\\s+"); // one or more space chars
// Result is words = {"What", "do", "you", "need", "from", "me?"};

You can even directly split a String literal:

String[] firstNames = "Mickey, Frank, Alicia, Tom".split(", ");
// Result is firstNames = {"Mickey", "Frank", "Alicia", "Tom"};

Warning: Do not forget that the parameter is always treated as a regular expression.

"aaa.bbb".split("."); // This returns an empty array

In the previous example . is treated as the regular expression wildcard that matches any character, and since every character is a delimiter, the result is an empty array.

Splitting based on a delimiter which is a regex meta-character

The following characters are considered special (aka meta-characters) in regex

< > - = ! ( ) [ ] { } \\ ^ $ | ? * + .

To split a string based on one of the above delimiters, you need to either escape them using \\\\ or use Pattern.quote():

String s = "a|b|c";
String regex = Pattern.quote("|");
String[] arr = s.split(regex);