How do I skip splitting when white space occurs?

Question

I want to split using ";" as delimiter and put outcome into the list of strings, for example

Input:

sentence;sentence;sentence

should produce:

[sentence, sentence, sentence]

Problem is some strings are like this: "sentence; continuation;new sentence", and for such I'd like the outcome to be: [sentence; continuation, new sentence].

I'd like to skip splitting when there is whitespace after (or before) semicolon.

Example string I'd like to split:

String sentence = "Ogłoszenie o zamówieniu;2022/BZP 00065216/01;"Dostawa pojemników na odpady segregowane (900 sztuk o pojemności 240 l – kolor żółty; 30 sztuk o pojemności 1100 l – kolor żółty).";Zakład Wodociągów i Usług Komunalnych EKOWOD Spółka z ograniczoną odpowiedzialnością"

I tried:

String[] splitted = sentence.split(";\\S");

But this cuts off the first character of each sentence.

Answer 1

You can use a regex negative lookahead/lookbehind for this.

String testString = "hello;world; test1 ;test2";

String[] splitString = testString.split("(?<! );(?! )"); // Negative lookahead and lookbehind

for (String s : splitString) System.out.println(s);

Output:

hello
world; test1 ;test2

Here, the characters near the start and end of the regex are saying "only split on the semicolon if there are no spaces before or after it"