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?

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";
    }
}