Java: Splitting a Pipe-delimited String - Fast!

This post shows how you can efficiently split a pipe-delimited string e.g. "foo|bar|baz". There are many ways to do this - I could even write my own - but I will only use those that are available in the JDK (or commonly used libraries) and will measure the performance of each.

Remember that, since the pipe symbol (|) is a special character in regular expressions, it needs to be escaped if necessary.

1. String.split

The most obvious way to split a string on the pipe character is to use Java's String.split:

public static String[] split(String s) {
  return s.split("\\|");
}

2. String.split with Pattern.quote

Instead of escaping the pipe ourselves, we can use Pattern.quote to do it for us. (Note: Pattern.quote("|") returns "\Q|\E".)

public static String[] splitWithPatternQuote(String s) {
  return s.split(Pattern.quote("|"));
}

3. Pattern.split

Create a static Pattern and use it to split the string.

private static final Pattern SPLITTER = Pattern.compile("\\|");

public static String[] splitWithPattern(String s) {
  return SPLITTER.split(s);
}

4. StringUtils.split

Apache Commons provides StringUtils.split, which splits a string on a single character:

import org.apache.commons.lang3.StringUtils;

public static String[] splitWithStringUtils(String s) {
  return StringUtils.split(s, '|');
}

So, which one is fastest?

I ran each method on 1 million pipe-delimited strings of different lengths - RandomStringUtils.randomAlphabetic is great for generating random strings - and the table below shows how long each one took:

Method	Time (ms)
split	485
splitWithStringUtils	520
splitWithPattern	643
splitWithPatternQuote	936

An interesting observation is that splitWithPatternQuote is so much slower than split, even though they both call String.split internally! If we delve into the source code for String.split, we can see that there is an optimisation (a "fastpath") if the provided regex has two-chars and the first char is a backslash. This applies to "\\|" but, since Pattern.quote produces \Q|\E, it does not use the fastpath and instead creates a new Pattern object for every split. This also explains why it is slower than splitWithPattern, which re-uses the same Pattern object.