Java regular expression value.split(“\\.”), “the back slash dot” divides by character?

My guess is that you are missing that backslash (‘\’) characters are escape characters in Java String literals. So when you want to use a ‘\’ escape in a regex written as a Java String you need to escape it; e.g.

Pattern.compile("\.");   // Java syntax error

// A regex that matches a (any) character
Pattern.compile(".");  

// A regex that matches a literal '.' character
Pattern.compile("\\.");  

// A regex that matches a literal '\' followed by one character
Pattern.compile("\\\\.");

The String.split(String separatorRegex) method splits a String into substrings separated by substrings matching the regex. So str.split("\\.") will split str into substrings separated by a single literal ‘.’ character.