What is the most efficient way to split a string by a very simple separator? Some background: I am porting a function I wrote in C with a bunch of pointer arithmetic to java and it is incredibly slow(After some optimisation still 5* slower). Having profiled it, it turns out a lot of that overhead is in String.split The function in question takes a host name or ip address and makes it generic: 123.123.123.123-*.123.123.123 a.b.c.example.com-*.example.com This can be run over several million items on a regular basis, so performance is an issue.