Parsing file and detection of pattern in Java

Question

My problem is quite simple, i am parsing a CSV file, line after line and i want to get the values of the columns. The separators used are simply ";", but my file can have quite a lot of columns, and they won't be always in the same order.

So as example for my .CSV file :

time;columnA;columnB,ColumnC
27-08-2013 14:43:00; this is a text; this too; same here

And i would like to be able to get all the values of time, columnA, columnB and columnC. What would be the easiest way?

I used StringUtils.countMatches(input, ";"); to get the number of separators i have. I started trying to make a String index[][] = {{"time", "columnA", "columnB", "columnC"}{}}; And my plan was to fill this with the number of ";" before each other variable, so that i could easily now which result stands for which variable.

But now i'm quite stuck...

If you want me to show more of my code, i can. Hope that someone can help me ! :)

(sorry for the poor english).

Answer 1

You can simply use split() method

For instance:

Scanner aScanner = ...
ArrayList<String> L = new ArrayList<String>();
while(aScanner.hasNextLine()){
    L.add(aScanner.nextLine());
}
int rows = L.size();
String[][] S = new String[rows][];
for (int i = 0; i < rows; i++) {
    S[i] = L.get(i).split(";");
}