Velocity - Splitting a string into an array

[Phillip_Wild]

Hey everyone

How would I take a field with values separated by backslashes "/" and split it into an array that I specify? I don't think .split will do the job - something like parseStringDelimiter or $convert.toString , or perhaps a combination!

Any ideas? My data looks like this:

ABCD/GIST/SPIT

Thanks in advance!

[SanfordWhiteman · Accepted solution]

split() will work, sure.

[Phillip_Wild]

Thanks Sanford.

I'm playing around with it and unfortunately having some trouble. I understand I need to escape the special character "/" in order to split the string based on that - but I can't seem to even get a basic split working.

Here's my code:

#set ($DossierArray = ${lead.wishListtoWin2016Dossiers}.split('\/'))

$DossierArray

And I get this error:

Cannot get email content-

An error occurred when procesing the email Body!

Lexical error, Encountered: "s" (115), after : "." at *unset*[line 12, column 66] near

    </div>  

${mktmail.Optout}

</body>

</html>

That's a similar error to the one I've often got when I haven't removed whitespace  - but I ran it through an online whitespace removal tool, so I don't think it's that. But my email that I'm previewing is ONLY the email script token, so it must be related to that token.

Strangely, I can't even seem to get a simple string split to work either. Using this code:

#set ($test = "This string contains the letter s")

$test.split('s')

I get this error:

[Ljava.lang.String;@151e693a

Clearly something is going horribly wrong here Any ideas why?

[SanfordWhiteman]

VTL doesn't use basic backslash escapes, only explicit Unicode: "\u002f" is a forward slash.

The second case isn't an error, it's showing you successfully split into an array of strings. You'd then have to loop over it or seek an array index.

[Phillip_Wild]

Thanks Sanford. Unfortunately I'm still having trouble - and I don't think it's related explicitly to that .split functionality now. When I use:

#set ($DossierArray = ${lead.wishListtoWin2016Dossiers}.split("\u002f"))

$DossierArray

I'm still getting that same lexical error above. Even when I replace the Unicode info with "a", it still gives me the same error. What does "s (115) mean?

[SanfordWhiteman]

Take out the curly braces.

[Nicholas_Manojl]

#set ($string = "ABCD/GIST/SPIT")
#set ($output = $string.split('/'))
$output[0]
$output[1]
$output[2]

Works for me

[SanfordWhiteman]

Also, Nicho is right that the forward slash doesn't actually need to be escaped in Velocity/Java regex.

It's still not a bad idea to escape it (as "\u002f" above ) so you don't get confused in JavaScript regex literals, where it is reserved (in JS, "a/b/c/d".split(///) is a syntax error and has to be "a/b/c/d".split(/\//) or "a/b/c/d".split(/\u002f/) ).

[Phillip_Wild]

Thanks everyone, it seems to be working correctly now!

Once I removed the brackets and referenced a specific part of the array it is working fine!