Is StringTokenizer needed?

The new capabilities provided with regular expressions might prompt you to wonder whether the original StringTokenizer class is still necessary. Before JDK 1.4, the way to split a string into parts was to “tokenize” it with StringTokenizer. But now it’s much easier and more succinct to do the same thing with regular expressions:

//: c12:ReplacingStringTokenizer.java
import java.util.regex.*;
import com.bruceeckel.simpletest.*;
import java.util.*;

public class ReplacingStringTokenizer {
  private static Test monitor = new Test();
  public static void main(String[] args) {
    String input = "But I'm not dead yet! I feel happy!";
    StringTokenizer stoke = new StringTokenizer(input);
    while(stoke.hasMoreElements())
      System.out.println(stoke.nextToken());
    System.out.println(Arrays.asList(input.split(" ")));
    monitor.expect(new String[] {
      "But",
      "I'm",
      "not",
      "dead",
      "yet!",
      "I",
      "feel",
      "happy!",
      "[But, I'm, not, dead, yet!, I, feel, happy!]"
    });
  }
} ///:~

With regular expressions, you can also split a string into parts using more complex patterns—something that’s much more difficult with StringTokenizer. It seems safe to say that regular expressions replace any tokenizing classes in earlier versions of Java.

You can learn much more about regular expressions in Mastering Regular Expressions, 2^nd Edition, by Jeffrey E. F. Friedl (O’Reilly, 2002).

Thinking in Java
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