.split() method in Java not found

Question

I am doing a TextReader() class in Java for an assignment, and I am trying to separate a String by any whitespaces, like so:

 String[] splitString;

 while (readLine != null) {
   //assign each word to an array

   splitString = splitString.split("\\s+");

}

however, I get the error "cannot find symbol split()" i've looked at some previous questions and nothing has worked.

What is `splitString`? What is it declared as? Does that type have a `split` method? — Sotirios Delimanolis, Mar 16 '14 at 15:48
i declared it as a String at the top of my code, i'll edit the question — Megan Sime, Mar 16 '14 at 15:52
It's not a `String`, it's a `String[]`. There's a big difference which you should look into. Array types only have the methods declared in `Object`. — Sotirios Delimanolis, Mar 16 '14 at 15:53
For an example how to split a `String` in Java you could look [here](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3481828/how-to-split-a-string-in-java) on StackOverflow — Stefan Freitag, Mar 16 '14 at 15:55

score 9 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 16 '14 at 15:50

9

Your splitString should be a String object to use split. Be sure that you have that declaration of it

String splittString = readLine.toString();
String[] splittedStringsArray = splittString.split('\\s+');

String split reference.

answered Mar 16 '14 at 15:50

RMachnik

3,598
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sorry, i meant to say, i declared that at the beginning of my code. i have `String splitString;` at the top :) – Megan Sime Mar 16 '14 at 15:51
Remeber that String.split() method returns an array of Strings. – RMachnik Mar 16 '14 at 15:53

Vlad Schnakovszki · Answer 2 · 2014-03-16T16:00:17.077

The problem is that your splitString variable should be a String which you could split, but you have declared it as a String[]. Assuming you are using a Scanner object scanner (wild guess since you're reading using a while loop), what you probably want to do is:

ArrayList<String> splitString = new ArrayList<String>();
while (scanner.hasNextLine()) {
    for (String s : scanner.nextLine().split("\\s+")) {
        splitString.add(s);
    }
}

score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Mar 16 '14 at 16:00

1

split() is a method that belongs to the String class. Your splitString is an array o Strings, therefore it cannot as a whole use the split() method. For that to work you would have to use something like splitString = splitString[0].split("\\s")

answered Mar 16 '14 at 16:00

Guilherme Lofrano Corneto

385
5
20

score 1 · Answer 4 · answered Oct 04 '18 at 11:42

This is the same happen to me just now. I start a new Kafka stream app with the maven. The command is here,

$ mvn archetype:generate \
    -DarchetypeGroupId=org.apache.kafka \
    -DarchetypeArtifactId=streams-quickstart-java \
    -DarchetypeVersion=2.0.0 \
    -DgroupId=streams.examples \
    -DartifactId=streams.examples \
    -Dversion=0.1 \
    -Dpackage=myapps

I get a code snippet like this auto-generated,

builder.stream("streams-plaintext-input")
                .flatMapValues(value -> Arrays.asList(value.split("\\W+")))
                .to("streams-linesplit-output");

This shows an error Cannot Resolve Method split(java.lang.String). Obviously, the split method belongs to the String class and hence, I had it to chnage as following,

builder.stream("streams-plaintext-input")
                .flatMapValues(value -> Arrays.asList(value.toString().split("\\W+")))
                .to("streams-linesplit-output");

I'm curious why the maven archetypes provide a wrong code snippet. I'm talking about the Java 8

.split() method in Java not found

4 Answers4