Split a String into a List in Kotlin

This article explores different ways to split a comma-separated String into a List in Kotlin.

Kotlin doesn’t provide any built-in function to convert a String to a List. We have the split() function, but that split a string into an array. The idea is to call the split() function on the string using the regex \s*,\s* as a delimiter, and convert the resultant string array into a list. The regex \s*,\s* matches with a comma, preceded/followed by zero or more whitespace characters. Here’s the complete code:

fun main() {

val str = "a, b, c, d"

val tokens = listOf(*str.split("\\s*,\\s*".toRegex()).toTypedArray())

println(tokens)

}

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Output:

[a, b, c, d]

If we need the mutable instance of the list, consider using the mutableListOf() function over the listOf() function.

fun main() {

val str = "a, b, c, d"

val tokens: List<String> = mutableListOf(*str.split("\\s*,\\s*".toRegex()).toTypedArray())

println(tokens)

}

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Output:

[a, b, c, d]

We can directly call the toMutableList() function on the resultant array with the split() function.

fun main() {

val str = "a, b, c, d"

val tokens = str.split("\\s*,\\s*".toRegex()).toMutableList()

println(tokens)

}

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Output:

[a, b, c, d]

That’s all about splitting a String into a List in Kotlin.

Split a String into a List in Kotlin

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