String.split(), Java 8 style

Wednesday, Sep 27, 2017 |

Today I found myself with a common problem: I had a delimited string of an unknown number of parts that that I needed split apart and process. Prior to Java 8, implementing that might looked something like this:

for (String part : string.split("\\n")) {
    if (!myList.contains(part)) {
        if (!part.isEmpty()) {
            myList.add(part);
        }
    }
}

While that works and seems to be pretty efficient, I felt it could use a stream makeover, as I find the stream operations to be clearer and more concise. What I ended up with was something like this:

Pattern.compile("\\n")
    .splitAsStream(string)
    .filter(s -> !myList.contains(s))
    .forEach( s -> myList.add(s));

I could also have used Arrays.stream() rather than Pattern:

Arrays.stream(string.split("\\" + DELIMITER))
    .filter(s -> !myList.contains(s))
    .filter(s -> !s.isEmpty())
    .forEach(s -> myList.add(s));

I haven't done any profiling to see if Pattern.compile() has any non-negligible performance impact versus String.split() (and I probably won't, but you can easily "cache" the compiled pattern in an instance or static variable if needed :), but I will point out this difference: when using split(), streamed or not, we may get a blank value in some situations, so we need to check for that (notice the calls toString.isEmpty() in both of those implementations). With the Pattern-based implementation, we don't have that problem.

At any rate, there you have it: you can convert String.split() to a stream-based implementation fairly easily, and, I think, get more readable code out of it. Any performance implications are left as an exercise for the reader. :)