If you by passed parsing json with a library and you have a string separated that was provided to you by a vendor, the snippets below will show you how to separate the string in a collection. A colon is a punctuation mark (:) indicating. This example follows similar approach found in parse string on comma.
Straight up Java
Using java's String.split method passing a regex will return an array of strings computed by splitting the original on a colon.
@Test
public void split_string_colon_java() {
String[] colonArray = "This:is:a:sentence:by:colon".split(":");
logger.info(Arrays.toString(colonArray));
assertTrue(colonArray.length == 6);
}Java 8
Producing a stream of strings then applying a java 8 function to the elements will produce an Arraylist of String arrays. Calling the flatmap will combine each array into a single stream by flattening it. Finally we will transform stream into arraylist.
@Test
public void split_string_colon_java8() {
List<String> splitByColon = Stream.of("This:is:a:sentence:by:colon")
.map(w -> w.split(":")).flatMap(Arrays::stream)
.collect(Collectors.toList());
logger.info(splitByColon);
assertTrue(splitByColon.size() == 6);
}Google Guava
Using guava's splitter we will parse a comma delimited string by passing a comma as a separator to the on method. Next we will call the splitToList function that will split the sequence into chunks and make them available via an ArrayList.
@Test
public void split_string_colon_guava() {
List<String> elementsInString = Splitter.on(":").splitToList(
"This:is:a:sentence:by:colon");
logger.info(elementsInString);
assertEquals(6, elementsInString.size());
}Apache Commons
Splits the provided text into an array, separators specified. This is an alternative to using StringTokenizer.
@Test
public void split_string_colon_using_apache_commons() {
String[] elementsInString = StringUtils.split(
"This:is:a:sentence:by:colon", ":");
logger.info(Arrays.toString(elementsInString));
assertTrue(elementsInString.length == 6);
}