Java - Splitting text into array without obvious delimiter

It looks like each column has a fixed size (number of characters). As you already said you cannot split by tabs or spaces because of the last line where there is no tab or space between name and city.

I propose to read one line and then split the String by line.substring(startIndex,endIndex). For example line.substring(0,18) for the name (if I counted correctly). Then you can split this name in first and lastname by using the space as delimiter.

Assuming the fields are fixed width, which is what it appears to be, you can do substring operations to get each field and then parse accordingly. Something like:

String name = line.substring(0,x)
String city_state = line.substring(x, y)
String num1 = line.substring(y,z)

Etc. where the x, y and z are the column breaks.

This seems to be the good old fixed-position file format. It was highly popular in the days of punch card readers.

So basically, you read this file line by line, and then:

String name = line.substring(0,17).trim();
String location = line.substring(17,33).trim();

String[] scores = new String[4];
scores[0] = line.substring(33,38);
scores[1] = line.substring(38,44);
scores[2] = line.substring(44,49);
scores[3] = line.substring(49,54);

You can then go on and split the name by space, the location by ,, convert the scores into numbers and so on.

If you want to make all of the above more general, you can prepare a list of indexes, and create the array based on those indexes:

int[] fieldIndexes = { 0, 17,33,38,44,49,54 };
String values[] = new String[fieldIndexes.length - 1];

And then in your read loop (again I assume you read the line into line):

for ( int i = 1; i < fieldIndexes.length; i++ ) {

     values[i-1] = line.substring(fieldIndexes[i-1],fieldIndexes[i]).trim();

}

And then proceed to work with the values array.

Of course, make sure each line you read has the appropriate number of characters etc. so as to avoid out-of-bounds problems.

Read line by line, then in each line, substring by the corresponding limits. e.g.:

private static String[] split(String line) {
    return new String[] {
        line.substring(0, 16).trim(),
        line.substring(17, 32).trim(),
        line.substring(33, 37).trim(),
        line.substring(38, 43).trim(),
        line.substring(44, 48).trim(),
        line.substring(49, 53).trim(),
    };
}

Why don't you split by index ? The coordinates are the tricky one, but if you always have two numbers after the decimal points then this example can help.

import java.io.BufferedReader;
import java.io.FileReader;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.util.ArrayList;
import java.util.List;


public class Split {

    public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException {

        List<Person> lst = new ArrayList<Split.Person>();

        BufferedReader br = new BufferedReader(new FileReader("c:\\test\\file.txt"));

        try {
            String line = null;

            while ((line = br.readLine()) != null) {

                Person p = new Person();

                String[] name = line.substring(0,17).split(" ");
                String[] city = line.substring(17,33).split(" ");

                p.setName(name[0].trim());
                p.setLastname(name[1].trim());
                p.setCity(city[0].replace(",","").trim());
                p.setState(city[1].replace(",","").trim());

                String[] coordinates = new String[4];
                String coor = line.substring(33);

                String first = coor.substring(0, coor.indexOf(".") + 3);

                coor = coor.substring(first.length());

                String second = coor.substring(0, coor.indexOf(".") + 3);

                coor = coor.substring(second.length());

                String third = coor.substring(0, coor.indexOf(".") + 3);

                coor = coor.substring(third.length());

                String fourth = coor.substring(0, coor.indexOf(".") + 3);

                coordinates[0] = first;
                coordinates[1] = second;
                coordinates[2] = third;
                coordinates[3] = fourth;

                p.setCoordinates(coordinates);

                lst.add(p);
            }

        } finally {
            br.close();
        }

        for(Person p : lst){
            System.out.println(p.getName());
            System.out.println(p.getLastname());
            System.out.println(p.getCity());
            System.out.println(p.getState());
            for(String s : p.getCoordinates()){
                System.out.println(s);
            }

            System.out.println();
        }
    }

    public static class Person {

        public Person(){}

        private String name;
        private String lastname;
        private String city;
        private String state;
        private String[] coordinates;
        public String getName() {
            return name;
        }
        public void setName(String name) {
            this.name = name;
        }
        public String getLastname() {
            return lastname;
        }
        public void setLastname(String lastname) {
            this.lastname = lastname;
        }
        public String getCity() {
            return city;
        }
        public void setCity(String city) {
            this.city = city;
        }
        public String getState() {
            return state;
        }
        public void setState(String state) {
            this.state = state;
        }
        public String[] getCoordinates() {
            return coordinates;
        }
        public void setCoordinates(String[] coordinates) {
            this.coordinates = coordinates;
        }
    }

}