Question about (split)

Question

Evening, the code below is supose to read a file, split it at every "|" and then print it. But it split it at every char. so instead of words I get chars.
-class FileHandler-
private static String[] names;
public static String[] getNames(){
      return names;
public static void readAuth(String fileName){
       String aLine;
       File file = new File("data/" +  fileName);
       try{
               FileInputStream fis = new FileInputStream(file);
               BufferedReader br = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(fis));
                        while ((aLine = br.readLine()) != null){
                        names = aLine.split("|");
                       br.close();
     }catch(IOException e){
           e.printStackTrace();
}-class Login.-
public void getAuth(){
     for (int i=0; i < FileHandler.getNames().length; i++){
     System.out.println(FileHandler.getNames());
Or have I misunderstood how split is working?
Greetings Magnus

Answer 1

ProjectMoon wrote:
Good enough. The | character has a special meaning in regex. So, if you want to actually split on the character itself, you need to escape it. Thus, you get "\|". However, that's not a valid escape sequence in Java itself. It is valid for >the regex engine though. So, you wind up with an escaped \, thus getting "\\|".Thank you. And just to make it clear. the same would go for the "&" and "!" then I guess.