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How to divide a string into equal groups of n characters padded with blank spaces in Java?

How to create a method that will take imput of a String and an integer n and output the String divided into parts consisting of n characters and separated by a blank space? For example, imput String: "THISISFUN", integer:3, result: "THI SIS FUN".
When you answer, can you please really try to explain what each part of the code does? I really want to understand it.
I tried using StringBuilder and the split() method but the problem is that I don't understand how all of that works. Therefore, I ended up kind of thoughtlessly pasting parts of codes from different online articles which doesn't work the best if you want to actually learn something, especially if you simply cannot find any posts about a specific issue. I could only find things like: "how to divide the String into n parts" and "how to ad a space after a specific char" which are sort of similar issues but not the same.

Here is one way to do it:
public static void splitString(String str, int groupSize){
char[] arr = str.toCharArray(); // Split the string into character array ①
// Iterate over array and print the characters
for(int i=0; i<arr.length; i++){
// If 'i' is a multiple of 'groupSize' ②
if(i > 0 && i % groupSize == 0){ ③
System.out.print(" ");
}
System.out.print(arr[i]);
}
}
① Split the string into a character array (so that you can access the characters individually). You can also do it using the charAt() method without splitting the string into an array. Read the Javadoc for more details.
② Check if the loop counter i is a multiple of groupSize
③ Note the use of System.out.print() as we do not want to print a newline. Here you can use a StringBuilder too and print the contents at the end instead of printing the characters inside the loop.

Android String.split("") returning extra element

I am trying to split a word into its individual letters.
I tried both String.split("") and String.split("|") however when I split a word it is creating a extra empty element.
Example:
word = "word";
int n = word.length();
Log.i("20",Integer.toString(n));
String[] letters = word.split("|");
Log.i("25",Integer.toString(letters.length));
The output in the Android Monitor is:
07-21 15:50:23.084 5711-5711/com.strizhevskiy.movetester I/20: 4
07-21 15:50:23.085 5711-5711/com.strizhevskiy.movetester I/25: 5
I put the individual letters into TextView blocks and I can actually see an extra empty TextView.
When I test these methods in my regular Java it outputs the expected answer: 4.
I am almost tempted to think this is an actual bug in Android's implementation of the method.

I am thinking you want to do this:
public Character[] toCharacterArray( String s ) {
if ( s == null ) {
return null;
}
int len = s.length();
Character[] array = new Character[len];
for (int i = 0; i < len ; i++) {
array[i] = new Character(s.charAt(i));
}
return array;
}
Instead of splitting a word without delimiters?
I hope this helps!

It's hard to say if it's bug or expected behavior, because what are you doing doesn't make sense. You are trying to split string with logical OR (split is waiting for Regular expression, not just a string), so as result it could be different result in Android comparing with normal java, and I don't see there any issue.
Anyway, there is many ways to achieve what you want in a normal way, e.g. just iterating over word by each char in a cycle or just use toCharArray String's method.

Thank you for the suggestions. My current work-around is to use a mock array and copying over into a fresh array using System.arraycopy().
String[] mockLetters = word.split("");
int n = word.length();
String[] letters = new String[n];
System.arraycopy(mockLetters,1,letters,0,n);
I appreciate the suggestions to use toCharArray(). However, these letters then get put into TextViews and TextView doesnt seem to accept char. I could, of coarse, make it work but I've decided to stick with what I currently have.
Tom, in a comment to my question, answered my underlying issue:
Why String.split() worked differently in Android than it does in Java?
Apparently the rules for String.split() changed with Java 8.

Try passing a 0 as the limit per the documentation below so that the trailing spaces are discarded.
String[] split (String regex,
int limit)
If n is zero then the pattern will be applied as many times as possible, the array can have any length, and trailing empty strings will be discarded.

Exporting specific pattern of string using split method in a most efficient way

I want to export pattern of bit stream in a String varilable. Assume our bit stream is something like bitStream="111000001010000100001111". I am looking for a Java code to save this bit stream in a specific array (assume bitArray) in a way that all continous "0"s or "1"s be saved in one array element. In this example output would be somethins like this:
bitArray[0]="111"
bitArray[1]="00000"
bitArray[2]="1"
bitArray[3]="0"
bitArray[4]="1"
bitArray[5]="0000"
bitArray[6]="1"
bitArray[7]="0000"
bitArray[8]="1111"
I want to using bitArray to calculate the number of bit which is stored in each continous stream. For example in this case the final output would be, "3,5,1,1,1,4,1,4,4". I figure it out that probably "split" method would solve this for me. But I dont know what splitting pattern would do that for me, if i Using bitStream.split("1+") it would split on contious "1" pattern, if i using bitStream.split("0+") it will do that base on continous"0" but how it could be based on both?
Mathew suggested this solution and it works:
var wholeString = "111000001010000100001111";
wholeString = wholeString.replace('10', '1,0');
wholeString = wholeString.replace('01', '0,1');
stringSplit = wholeString.split(',');
My question is "Is this solution the most efficient one?"

Try replacing any occurrence of "01" and "10" with "0,1" and "1,0" respectively. Then once you've injected the commas, split the string using the comma as the delimiting character.
String wholeString = "111000001010000100001111"
wholeString = wholeString.replace("10", "1,0");
wholeString = wholeString.replace("01", "0,1");
String stringSplit[] = wholeString.split(",");

You can do this with a simple regular expression. It matches 1s and 0s and will return each in the order they occur in the stream. How you store or manipulate the results is up to you. Here is some example code.
String testString = "111000001010000100001111";
Pattern pattern = Pattern.compile("1+|0+");
Matcher matcher = pattern.matcher(testString);
while (matcher.find())
{
System.out.print(matcher.group().length());
System.out.print(" ");
}
This will result in the following output:
3 5 1 1 1 4 1 4 4
One option for storing the results is to put them in an ArrayList<Integer>
Since the OP wanted most efficient, I did some tests to see how long each answer takes to iterate over a large stream 10000 times and came up with the following results. In each test the times were different but the order of fastest to slowest remained the same. I know tick performance testing has it's issues like not accounting for system load but I just wanted a quick test.
My answer completed in 1145 ms
Alessio's answer completed in 1202 ms
Matthew Lee Keith's answer completed in 2002 ms
Evgeniy Dorofeev's answer completed in 2556 ms
Hope this helps

I won't give you a code, but I'll guide you to a possible solution:
Construct an ArrayList<Integer>, iterate on the array of bits, as long as you have 1's, increment a counter and as soon as you have 0, add the counter to the ArrayList. After this procedure, you'll have an ArrayList that contain numbers, etc: [1,2,2,3,4] - Representing a serieses of 1's and 0's.
This will represent the sequences of 1's and 0's. Then you construct an array of the size of the ArrayList, and fill it accordingly.
The time complexity is O(n) because you need to iterate on the array only once.

This code works for any String and patterns, not only 1s and 0s. Iterate char by char, and if the current char is equal to the previous one, append the last char to the last element of the List, otherwise create a new element in the list.
public List<String> getArray(String input){
List<String> output = new ArrayList<String>();
if(input==null || input.length==0) return output;
int count = 0;
char [] inputA = input.toCharArray();
output.add(inputA[0]+"");
for(int i = 1; i <inputA.length;i++){
if(inputA[i]==inputA[i-1]){
String current = output.get(count)+inputA[i];
output.remove(count);
output.add(current);
}
else{
output.add(inputA[i]+"");
count++;
}
}
return output;
}

try this
String[] a = s.replaceAll("(.)(?!\\1)", "$1,").split(",");

I tried to implement #Maroun Maroun solution.
public static void main(String args[]){
long start = System.currentTimeMillis();
String bitStream ="0111000001010000100001111";
int length = bitStream.length();
char base = bitStream.charAt(0);
ArrayList<Integer> counts = new ArrayList<Integer>();
int count = -1;
char currChar = ' ';
for (int i=0;i<length;i++){
currChar = bitStream.charAt(i);
if (currChar == base){
count++;
}else {
base = currChar;
counts.add(count+1);
count = 0;
}
}
counts.add(count+1);
System.out.println("Time taken :" + (System.currentTimeMillis()-start ) +"ms");
System.out.println(counts.toString());
}
I believe it is more effecient way, as he said it is O(n) , you are iterating only once. Since the goal to get the count only not to store it as array. i woul recommen this. Even if we use Regular Expression ( internal it would have to iterate any way )
Result out put is
Time taken :0ms
[1, 3, 5, 1, 1, 1, 4, 1, 4, 4]

Try this one:
String[] parts = input.split("(?<=1)(?=0)|(?<=0)(?=1)");
See in action here: http://rubular.com/r/qyyfHNAo0T

Splitting string N into N/X strings

I would like some guidance on how to split a string into N number of separate strings based on a arithmetical operation; for example string.length()/300.
I am aware of ways to do it with delimiters such as
testString.split(",");
but how does one uses greedy/reluctant/possessive quantifiers with the split method?
Update: As per request a similar example of what am looking to achieve;
String X = "32028783836295C75546F7272656E745C756E742E657865000032002E002E005C0"
Resulting in X/3 (more or less... done by hand)
X[0] = 32028783836295C75546F
X[1] = 6E745C756E742E6578650
x[2] = 65000032002E002E005C0
Dont worry about explaining how to put it into the array, I have no problem with that, only on how to split without using a delimiter, but an arithmetic operation

You could do that by splitting on (?<=\G.{5}) whereby the string aaaaabbbbbccccceeeeefff would be split into the following parts:
aaaaa
bbbbb
ccccc
eeeee
fff
The \G matches the (zero-width) position where the previous match occurred. Initially, \G starts at the beginning of the string. Note that by default the . meta char does not match line breaks, so if you want it to match every character, enable DOT-ALL: (?s)(?<=\G.{5}).
A demo:
class Main {
public static void main(String[] args) {
int N = 5;
String text = "aaaaabbbbbccccceeeeefff";
String[] tokens = text.split("(?<=\\G.{" + N + "})");
for(String t : tokens) {
System.out.println(t);
}
}
}
which can be tested online here: http://ideone.com/q6dVB
EDIT
Since you asked for documentation on regex, here are the specific tutorials for the topics the suggested regex contains:
\G, see: http://www.regular-expressions.info/continue.html
(?<=...), see: http://www.regular-expressions.info/lookaround.html
{...}, see: http://www.regular-expressions.info/repeat.html

If there's a fixed length that you want each String to be, you can use Guava's Splitter:
int length = string.length() / 300;
Iterable<String> splitStrings = Splitter.fixedLength(length).split(string);
Each String in splitStrings with the possible exception of the last will have a length of length. The last may have a length between 1 and length.
Note that unlike String.split, which first builds an ArrayList<String> and then uses toArray() on that to produce the final String[] result, Guava's Splitter is lazy and doesn't do anything with the input string when split is called. The actual splitting and returning of strings is done as you iterate through the resulting Iterable. This allows you to just iterate over the results without allocating a data structure and storing them all or to copy them into any kind of Collection you want without going through the intermediate ArrayList and String[]. Depending on what you want to do with the results, this can be considerably more efficient. It's also much more clear what you're doing than with a regex.

How about plain old String.substring? It's memory friendly (as it reuses the original char array).

well, I think this is probably as efficient a way to do this as any other.
int N=300;
int sublen = testString.length()/N;
String[] subs = new String[N];
for(int i=0; i<testString.length(); i+=sublen){
subs[i] = testString.substring(i,i+sublen);
}
You can do it faster if you need the items as a char[] array rather as individual Strings - depending on how you need to use the results - e.g. using testString.toCharArray()

Dunno, you'll probably need a method that takes string and int times and returns a list of strings. Pseudo code (haven't checked if it works or not):
public String[] splintInto(String splitString, int parts)
{
int dlength = splitString.length/parts
ArrayList<String> retVal = new ArrayList<String>()
for(i=0; i<splitString.length;i+=dlength)
{
retVal.add(splitString.substring(i,i+dlength)
}
return retVal.toArray()
}

Homework: Java IO Streaming and String manipulation

In Java,
I need to read lines of text from a file and then reverse each line, writing the reversed version into another file. I know how to read from one file and write to another. What I don't know how to do is manipulate the text so that "This is line 1" would be written into the second file as "1 enil si sihT"

since these are homeworks you are probably interested in your own implementation of reverse method.
The naive version visits the string backwards (from the last index to the index 0) while copying it in a StringBuilder:
public String reverse(String s) {
StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
for (int i = s.length() - 1; i >= 0; i--) {
sb.append(s.charAt(i));
}
return sb.toString();
}
for example the String "hello":
H e l l o
0 1 2 3 4 // indexes for charAt()
the method start by the index 4 ('o') then the index 3 ('l') ... until 0 ('H').

StringBuilder buffer = new StringBuilder(theString);
return buffer.reverse().toString();

If this is homework, it would be better for you to understand how are data stored into the string it self.
A string may be represented as an array of characters
String line = // read line ....;
char [] data = line.toCharArray();
To reverse an array you have to swap the positions of the elements. The first in the last, the last in the first and so on.
int l = data.length;
char temp;
temp = data[0]; // put the first element in "temp" to avoid losing it.
data[0] = data[l - 1]; // put the last value in the first;
data[l - 1] = temp; // and the first in the last.
Continue with the rest of the elements ( hint use a loop ) in the array and then create a new String with the result:
String modifiedString = new String( data ); // where data is the reversed array.
If is not ( and you really just need to have the work done ) use:
StringBuilder.reverse()
Good luck.

String reversed = new StringBuilder(textLine).reverse().toString();

The provided answers all suggest using an already existing method, which is sound advice and usually more effective than writing your own.
Depending on the assignment, however, your teacher might expect you to write a method of your own. If that is the case, try using a for loop to walk through the string character by character, only instead of counting from zero and up, start counting from the last character index and down to zero, consecutively building the reversed string.

While we're feeding horrible, finished answers to the poor student, we might as well whet his appetite for the bizarre. If strings were guaranteed to be reasonably short and CPU time was no object, this is what I'd code:
public static String reverse(String str) {
if (str.length() == 0) return "";
else return reverse(str.substring(1)) + str.charAt(0);
}
(OK, I admit it: my current favorite language is Clojure, a Lisp!)
BONUS HOMEWORK: Figure out if, how and why this works!

java.lang.StringBuffer has a reverse method.