I am completely new to regular expressions so I'm looking for a bit of help here. I am compiling under JDK 1.5 Take this line as an example that I read from standard input: ab:Some string po:bubblegum What I would like to do is split by the two characters and colon. That is, once the line is split and put into a string array, these should be the terms: ab:Some string po:bubblegum I have this regex right now: String[] split = input.split("[..:]"); This splits at the semicolon; what I would like is for it to match two characters and a semicolon, but split at the space before that starts. Is this even possible? Here is the output from the string array: ab Some String po bubblegum I've read about Pattern.compile() as well. Is this something I should be considering?