Using the String.split() method with a Pipe Delimiter

Today I noticed a very interesting fact about the String.split() and String.contains() methods within Salesforce while attempting to iterate through a text field that contained one or more pipe (|) delimited strings. First, I ran a check to ensure that the text contained the pipe delimiter by using the String.contains() method. If it did contain the pipe delimiter, I then used the String.split() method to create a string array. Upon running my code and seeing that it did not execute as I intended I ran a few System.debug() calls and noticed that String.split(‘|’) will actually split a string into an array of its characters rather than splitting around the pipe delimiter itself. In order to correct this issue I had to change my split call to String.split(‘\\|’), which splits the string using REGEX matching. I then updated my contains call to String.contains(‘\\|’) only to find that the String.contains() method was searching for the literal string ‘\\|’ instead of utilizing REGEX matching so I had to change it back to String.contains(‘|’). In sum, be careful how you utilize REGEX matching when using the String.split() and String.contains() methods!

BAD → String.split(‘|’)

GOOD → String.split(‘\\|’)

BAD → String.contains(‘\\|’)

GOOD → String.contains(‘|’)

EDIT: Another note on the String.split() command — if you need to include any trailing empty strings after the final pipe delimiter be sure to insert -1 as a second parameter to the method like this:

String.split(‘\\|’,-1)

Thanks to these sites for helping me resolve this issue:

String Splitting

Splitting a string using '|'