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Split a string with multiple unique delimiters

I have string in this format
x/1.25 o/33.3 description for item A`
Now, I want to split it so it becomes
1.25, 33.3, description for item A
So far, I used .split(x/|o/) which works for this case. However, it becomes invalid if the user put x/ or o/ in the description of item A, like description o/ item A.
Is there any better regex that utilize the order of the parameter and delimiter in above string format? Thanks in advance.

One possible way is to do
String[] fields = input.split("\\s+",3);
which will split into 3 blank-delimited fields. Then apply your regex to only the first two and reassemble the result into the output.

Extracting fields from .csv file input line

I'm very new to the world of Java programming, and although I know this is a ridiculously easy question, I can't seem to phrase my searches in a way that turns up the answer I need...so hopefully someone from this community won't mind helping me.
MY program needs to take an input line from a .csv file and split it into fields of an array, using commas as delimiters. The fields of the array are then assigned to variables that are different data types - char, int, float, and string. What I'm struggling with is the formatting for my String variables.
Here is part of my code:
public void parseCSV(String inputLine) {
String[] splitFields;
splitFields = inputLine.split(",");
try {
empNumber = Integer.parseInt(splitFIelds[0[);
payType = splitFields[1].charAt(0);
hourlyRate = Float.parseFloat(splitFields[2]);
last name =
I need to assign variable lastName, a String data type, to position 3 of my splitFields array. I just don't know how to format it. Help would be greatly appreciated!

A warning on your overall approach
Go with the other answers if you're doing a homework assignment with a simple csv file, but splitting a String on the comma character , will not work for more complicated CSVs. Example:
"Roberts, John", Chicago
This should be read as two cells where the first string is Roberts, John. Naive splitting on , will read this as three cells: "Roberts, John", and Chicago.
What you should be doing (for robust code)
If you're writing serious/production level code, you should use the Apache Commons CSV library to parse CSVs. There are enough tricky issues with commas and quotations, enough variation in possible formats that it makes sense to use a mature library. There's no reason to reinvent the wheel.
Another tool for parsing text
If you're a beginner, this might be opening up a can of worms, but a powerful tool for parsing/validating text input is "regular expressions." Regular expressions can be used to match a string against a pattern and to extract portions of a string. Once you have extracted a String from a specific cell of a csv, you could use a regular expression to validate that the String is in the format you're expecting.
While you're unlikely to really need regular expressions for this project, I thought I'd mention it.

String.split(...) returns a String[] so you really can just assign a specific index to a String.
String s = "one two dog!";
String[] sa = s.split(" ");
String ns = sa[1]; // ns now equals "two"
so you can just:
last_name = splitFields[index]; // this will work fine as long as index is within the `array` bounds.
Please mind that your last name var has a space(that might have been you problem).
I also recommend minding the parses, Integer.parseInt(...) & Float.parseFloat(...) might throw a NumberFormatException if you try to parse a non decimal values.

Easy, it is already a String, so you do not have to perform additional parsing. The following assignment will do the trick:
lastName = splitFields[3];

Java XML string literals abruptly terminated

I have some Java code that looks like this:
String xml = "<string>" + escapeXml(input) + "</string>";
protected String escapeXml(String input) {
return input.replaceAll("&", "&")
.replaceAll("'", "&apos;")
.replaceAll("\"", """)
.replaceAll("<", "<")
.replaceAll(">", ">")
}
input is a variable UTF-8 encoded string.
What I'm finding is that in some cases the xml string ends up being equal to <string> without the enclosing </string>. Why might this be? Is it possible for Java to evaluate escapeXml into something that truncates the string before </string> can be appended to it?
UPDATE: In response to Sotirios, let me add some clarifications. The xml string is being saved to a SQLite database column, which in turn is parsed by another utility. So far, I've noticed that this behavior occurs when the xml string saved to the database is either <string> or <string> with some non-ASCII Unicode character afterwards.
input is being fed automatically from a hook into an Android function. Because everything is running on Android in a non-standard configuration, it's a bit difficult to debug to learn exactly what's going on. I was hoping that there might be some obvious answer involving Java strings.

I never got to the bottom of this, but I did fix my problem by modifying the escapeXml function to use a proper XML encoder (org.apache.commons.lang library). I don't see how that would make a difference, but it did, and now the xml string is properly constructed.

android long dash in string in code

I am trying to put a long dash "—" between two words in String in my Android project. For example something like this:
Name — Surname
The String will be converted in code, not in xml. The only way i found to do this, is converting String to HTML and back. Like this:
stringBuilder.append(Name).append(" & mdash; ").append(Surname);
Html.fromHtml(stringBuilder.toString()).toString();
(Space between "&" and "mdash;" to prevent convertation on stackoverflow).
Can it be done more elegant, without converting to HTML and back? Thanks

Have you tried unicode notation \u2014?
Reference: How to convert a string with Unicode encoding to a string of letters

What's the best way to have stringTokenizer split up a line of text into predefined variables

I'm not sure if the title is very clear, but basically what I have to do is read a line of text from a file and split it up into 8 different string variables. Each line will have the same 8 chunks in the same order (title, author, price, etc). So for each line of text, I want to end up with 8 strings.
The first problem is that the last two fields in the line may or may not be present, so I need to do something with stringTokenizer.hasMoreTokens, otherwise it will die messily when fields 7 and 8 are not present.
I would ideally like to do it in one while of for loop, but I'm not sure how to tell that loop what the order of the fields is going to be so it can fill all 8 (or 6) strings correctly. Please tell me there's a better way that using 8 nested if statements!
EDIT: The String.split solution seems definitely part of it, so I will use that instead of stringTokenizer. However, I'm still not sure what the best way of feeding the individual strings into the constructor. Would the best way be to have the class expecting an array, and then just do something like this in the constructor:
line[1] = isbn;
line[2] = title;

The best way is to not use a StringTokenizer at all, but use String's split method. It returns an array of Strings, and you can get the length from that.
For each line in your file you can do the following:
String[] tokens = line.split("#");
tokens will now have 6 - 8 Strings. Use tokens.length() to find out how many, then create your object from the array.

Regular expression is the way. You can convert your incoming String into an array of String using the split method
http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/docs/api/java/lang/String.html#split(java.lang.String)

Would a regular expression with capture groups work for you? You can certainly make parts of the expression optional.
An example line of data or three might be helpful.

Is this a CSV or similar file by any chance? If so, there are libraries to help you, for example Apache Commons CSV (link to alternatives on their page too). It will get you a String[] for each line in the file. Just check the array size to know what optional fields are present.