problem replacing and splitting string

Question

I am trying to replace a pipe character used as a delimiter in a string. The string comes back with the pipe as the html entity code like this: Unassigned|Scheduled|Tech on Site

Now, I'm trying to replace and/or split this string into a string list, but I can't seem to get the replace or split to work.

string s = String.valueOf(params.get('status'));
string newString = s.replace('|', '|');
String[]  strs =  newString.split('|');

I get the following result:

strs (, U, n, a, s, s, i, g, n, e, ...)

Thanks for any help.

Answer 1

Split in Apex is very similar to Java string split.

the pattern you pass to the split method is not a direct match, its a REGEX pattern. so the pipe symbol | is considered as a Regex input and it splits the string into individual characters.

You can use the below code to get thru this

newString.split('\\|')

here's some other discussions around the same topic

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6978901/splitting-a-string-using

and a blog post from Lacey on the same topic