I have job with regex in my expressions: example !(FA1_A.i & FA1_M.i) I have operators ! ( ) & | operands have names [a-zA-Z_]*.[a-zA-Z_] I wrote in Java to split on tokens, but it doesn't split on operators and operands If should be !, (, FA1_A.i, &, FA1_m.i, ) . Can anybody tell me what is wrong ? String stringOpеrator = "([!|&()])"; String stringOperand = "(([a-zA-Z_]*)\\.([a-zA-Z_]*))"; String reg=stringOpеrator+"|"+stringOperand; Pattern pattern = Pattern.compile(reg); Matcher m = pattern.matcher(expression); // System.out.println("func: " + function + " item: " + item); while (m.find()) { int a=m.start(); int b=m.end(); String test=expression.substring(m.start(), m.end()); String g=test; tokens.add(new Token(expression.substring(m.start() , m.end()))); //m = pattern.matcher(expression); }