Question: I'm looking to split a List of Strings up as i iterate throught the list imagine the following as the List.

```
["StringA.StringB.StringC"]["StringA.StringB.StringC"]["StringA.StringB.StringC"]["StringA.StringB.StringC"]

```

So i want to iterate through the list pull out each string (`"StringA.StringB.StringC"`)

Then want to seperate by the `"."` and assign StringA to a String variable - String B to one and String C. Perform some work and move on to the next.

Any ideas how i can do this?

Answer: 
Of course! You just want [`String#split()`](http://download.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/lang/String.html#split%28java.lang.String%29).

```
for (String s : myList)
{
    String[] tokens = s.split("\\.");
    // now, do something with tokens
}

```

You need to escape the period in the argument to `split()` because the string is interpreted as a [regex pattern](http://download.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/util/regex/Pattern.html#sum), and an unescaped period (`"."`) will match any character - **not** what you want!
So you have a list of String[] which are concatenated strings. Unless this is some sort of legacy data structure, you might do better to make this more uniform in some way. 

In any case, iteration is pretty straightforward - 

```
List<String[]> l = ....

for (String[] outer: l) { 
       for (String s: outer){
            for (String inner: s.split("\\.")) // s.split takes a regex and returns a String[],
                 // inner has your inner values now

```