How to split a string in C/C++, Python and Java?

Difficulty Level : Easy
Last Updated : 25 Nov, 2020

Splitting a string by some delimiter is a very common task. For example, we have a comma-separated list of items from a file and we want individual items in an array.

Almost all programming languages, provide function split a string by some delimiter.

In C/C++:

// Splits str[] according to given delimiters.
// and returns next token. It needs to be called
// in a loop to get all tokens. It returns NULL
// when there are no more tokens.
char * strtok(char str[], const char *delims);

// A C/C++ program for splitting a string 
// using strtok() 
#include <stdio.h> 
#include <string.h> 
  
int main() 
{ 
    char str[] = "Geeks-for-Geeks"; 
  
    // Returns first token  
    char *token = strtok(str, "-"); 
    
    // Keep printing tokens while one of the 
    // delimiters present in str[]. 
    while (token != NULL) 
    { 
        printf("%s\n", token); 
        token = strtok(NULL, "-"); 
    } 
  
    return 0; 
} 

Output:

Geeks
for
Geeks

In Java :
In Java, split() is a method in String class.

// expregexp is the delimiting regular expression; 
// limit is the number of returned strings
public String[] split(String regexp, int limit);

// We can call split() without limit also
public String[] split(String regexp)

// A Java program for splitting a string 
// using split() 
import java.io.*; 
public class Test 
{ 
    public static void main(String args[]) 
    { 
        String Str = new String("Geeks-for-Geeks"); 
  
        // Split above string in at-most two strings   
        for (String val: Str.split("-", 2)) 
            System.out.println(val); 
  
        System.out.println(""); 
    
        // Splits Str into all possible tokens  
        for (String val: Str.split("-")) 
            System.out.println(val); 
    } 
} 

Output:

Geeks
for-Geeks

Geeks
for
Geeks

In Python:
The split() method in Python returns a list of strings after breaking the given string by the specified separator.

 
  // regexp is the delimiting regular expression; 
  // limit is limit the number of splits to be made 
  str.split(regexp = "", limit = string.count(str))

line = "Geek1 \nGeek2 \nGeek3"; 
print line.split() 
print line.split(' ', 1) 

Output:

['Geek1', 'Geek2', 'Geek3']
['Geek1', '\nGeek2 \nGeek3']

This article is contributed by Aditya Chatterjee. If you like GeeksforGeeks and would like to contribute, you can also write an article and mail your article to contribute@geeksforgeeks.org. See your article appearing on the GeeksforGeeks main page and help other Geeks.

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