Parsing objects from complex String in Java

Question

I want to convert string arrays with following structure:

static String[] lines = {
 "@1 var_decl name: testStr parent: @7", 
 " srcp: Auto.cpp:6 "
 };

into Java objects with following structure:

class Token {
 String type;
 String name;
 String source;
 Token parent;
}

So far I'm parsing this in this way:

Token parseLines(String[] lines) {
 String[] firstElements = lines[0].split(" ");
 String[] secondElements = lines[1].split(" ");
 Token newToken = new Token();
 newToken.type = firstElements[6];
 newToken.name = firstElements[16];
 String parentName = firstElements[19];
 newToken.parent = getParent(parent); // find parent by name
 newToken.source = secondElements[26];
 return newToken;
}

As you can see, this is far from elegant. How can I improve this?

• Kao: @Heslacher Yup, fixed.
• Heslacher: Not completely check length
• 200_success: The code seems obviously broken in other ways too.
• Kao: I've rewritten the whole code.

Answer 1

My approach would start by looking something like the code below. Obviously whatever you wind up with should be in its own class/method to do the mapping from String[] to Token.

public final class Test {
 private static final int TYPE_COLUMN = 1;
 private static final int NAME_COLUMN = 3;
 private static final int PARENT_COLUMN = 5;
 private static final int SOURCE_COLUMN = 7;
 public static void main(final String[] args) {
 final String[] lines = {
 "@1 var_decl name: testStr parent: @7",
 " srcp: Auto.cpp:6 "
 };
 final String[] values = (lines[0] + lines [1]).split("\\s+");
 System.out.println(All Values:" + java.util.Arrays.toString(values));
 System.out.println("Type: " + values[TYPE_COLUMN]);
 System.out.println("Name: " + values[NAME_COLUMN]);
 System.out.println("Parent: " + getParent(values[PARENT_COLUMN]));
 System.out.println("Source: " + values[SOURCE_COLUMN]);
 }
 private static String getParent(final String parentId) {
 return "Parent";
 }
}