How To Make Commons Configuration's setListDelimiter Work?

Question

I would like to use an alternate list delimiter in Apache Commons Configuration. However, despite trying a great many different ways of accessing a Configuration object and setting its list delimiter, I can never get it to actually use anything other than the default comma delimiter.

I'm using Commons Configuration version 1.8.0 with Java 1.6.0_29 on Mac OS X.

EDIT:

I need to load an XML configuration definition file that establishes a four-tier set of configuration sources:

  <configuration>
      <system/>
      <properties fileName="top.properties"/>
      <properties fileName="bop.properties"/>
      <properties fileName="fop.properties"/>
  </configuration>

... which I supply to the DefaultConfigurationBuilder constructor:

  val configBuilder = new DefaultConfigurationBuilder(configURL)

I've tried both overloads of getConfiguration on the resulting DefaultConfigurationBuilder. The zero-arg version is declared to return Configuration, not a sub-class of AbstractConfiguration (though it can be cast to AbstractConfiguration) and Configuration does not even define setListDelimiter.

Can you clarify how, given these requirements, I can get control over the list delimiter?

FOLLOW-UP:

Calling AbstractConfiguration.setDefaultListDelimiter(listDelim) solved the problem for me.

Randall Schulz

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Feb 24 '12 at 08:29

To change the list delimiter for a single configuration object use the method setListDelimiter().

To change the list delimiter for all configurations, use the static method setDefaultListDelimiter().

Changing the delimiter will only affect new configuration parsings. So either refresh() your configuration or load your configuration file only after setting the list delimiter.

Example

ListDelimiterDemo.java

import org.apache.commons.configuration.AbstractFileConfiguration;
import org.apache.commons.configuration.ConfigurationException;
import org.apache.commons.configuration.PropertiesConfiguration;


public class ListDelimiterDemo {

    public static void main(String[] args) throws ConfigurationException {
        AbstractFileConfiguration config = new PropertiesConfiguration();
        config.setListDelimiter('|');
        config.load("config.properties");

        for (Object listItem : config.getList("myprop")) {
            System.out.println(listItem);
        }
    }
}

config.properties:

myprop=hello|world|!

Prints:

hello
world
!

How To Make Commons Configuration's setListDelimiter Work?

1 Answers1