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I want the scanner to ignore three things: empty spaces, "/" and "!". What is the correct argument to use in the useDelimiter method?

Mureinik
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2 Answers2

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Scanner's delimiter is just a pattern, so you could use the following:

sc.useDelimiter("[\\s/!]*");
Mureinik
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    Why are you using `#`? – OneCricketeer Aug 14 '17 at 13:59
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    i want to give the scanner something like "Anna Mills/Female/18" and then use System.out.println(scan.next()) to get each word on separate lines. so the scanner should ignore both empty space and " / " sign. i used your suggested code and it doesn't do that... –  Aug 14 '17 at 14:02
  • For some reason I had in my mind that OP was using `#` as a possible delimiter. Meant to use `/` - edited and fixed. – Mureinik Aug 14 '17 at 14:40
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useDelimiter takes a regex argument docs:

pattern - A string specifying a delimiting pattern

So just make sure the string is in regex form.

Whitespace in regex is \s, escape that to become \\s. / is still / and ! is still !. You then use | to act as an "or" operator to say "either one of these".

Here's how to do it:

scanner.useDelimiter("\\s|/|!");

If you want to say that "consecutive whitespaces slashes and exclamation marks also count as delimiter", then you can add a quantifier + to the whole thing:

scanner.useDelimiter("(\\s|/|!)+");
Sweeper
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