Accessing a specific position in a string of delimited data

From: Aki Laukkanen (aki.laukkanenREMOVE_THIS_at_helsinki.fi)
Date: 05/26/04 

Date: Wed, 26 May 2004 10:50:36 +0300

I've been puzzled by the following problem for quite some time now:
Suppose you have an ASCII file of thousands of lines of delimited data,
like this:

12153753 000775 027 0005 0013 0356 0894 0010 1499 0217 0000 001 001 ...
data ^ ^
         delimiter (space) position x

What you want is a summary of certain data at a specific position on
each line.
I've used the FileReader and BufferedReader classes to read each line
into a StringBuffer, but have run into problems trying to extract
position x, where x equals the number of delimiters before the data I
want to access.
Using the indexOf() -function seems a bit complicated and I've failed to
achieve the desired results with this. I tried using the subString
function to get a string from index of(delimiter x) to index of
(delimiter x+1), but for some reason it does not work right. I also
tried using nested indexOf -functions, like:

indexOf(delimiter, indexOf(delimiter)) etc.

That does not seem to work too well either plus it gets awfully
complicated to read.

My next solution to this was to use a for-loop like this:

for (int i = 0; i < positionX ;i++){
//delete up to the first delimiter
dataStringBuffer.delete(0, dataStringBuffer.indexOf(delimiter);
}
//delete the end of the string after the desired data
dataStringBuffer.delete(dataStringBuffer.indexOf(delimiter),
dataStringBuffer.length());

But that does not work correctly either.

Does anyone have a useful solution to this? 

-- 
-Aki "Sus" Laukkanen

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