On Mon, Oct 26, 2009 at 1:38 PM, Stephen Colebourne <scolebou...@joda.org>wrote:
Unfortunately, the null-handling behaviour of the static method is > considered a feature to many That is unfortunate. <evil grin> Luckily any new JDK methods would not have to carry forward the null-tolerant approach. :-) By the way, one advantage of a Strings class is that it could contain a new > implementation of split - one that doesn't use regex and isn't as > complex/useless as the current one on String. > Different splitting use cases want to specify the delimiter as any of a regex, a literal String, a literal char, or what we (Guava) call a "CharMatcher". One way to support all these is to just support regex, as any of the rest of these can be coerced into a regex; this is what String.split() does. Another way is to just outright support them all, as Guava's Splitter does: http://guava-libraries.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/javadoc/com/google/common/base/Splitter.html It also supports splitting into fixed-width segments, which -- well, I guess that can be coerced into a regex too, just a really frickin' weird one. Splitter has a few other optional behaviors that users depend on. The point of all this is that doing splitting well is going to take more than just a few static methods in a utility class. By and large, we've found this to be the case with nearly everything (but not everything) we first thought of as a StringUtil method. -- Kevin Bourrillion @ Google internal: http://go/javalibraries external: guava-libraries.googlecode.com
