java - Split individual characters from a string

Question

I'm writing following program to separate characters from a string and assign it to an array.

public class Str {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        String str = "hello";
        String[] chars = str.split("");
        for (int i = 0; i < chars.length; i++) {
            System.out.println(i + ":" + chars[i]);
        }
    }
}

The output I'm getting is:

0:
1:h
2:e
3:l
4:l
5:o

I'm getting an empty string as the first element of the array. I was expecting the output to be without empty string and the length of chars array to be 5 instead of 6. Why empty char is coming after splitting this String?

Answer 1

You can use String#toCharArray() method:

String str = "hello";
char[] arr = str.toCharArray();

---

As for your question, when you split on an empty string, you will get the first element as empty string, because, your string starts with an empty string, and after every character also, there is an empty string.

So, the first split occurs before the first character.

 h e l l o
^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^
"Split location"

The trailing empty strings are discarded, as specified in documentation:

Trailing empty strings are therefore not included in the resulting array.