Try this regex "[-.]+". The + after treats consecutive delimiter chars as one. Remove plus if you do not want this.

I still suggest to use split(), it skips null tokens by default. you want to get rid of non numeric characters in the string and only keep pipes and numbers, then you can easily use split() to get what you want. or you can pass multiple delimiters to split (in form of regex) and this should work:

String[] splited = yourString.split("[\\|\\s]+");

and the regex:

import java.util.regex.*;

Pattern pattern = Pattern.compile("\\d+(?=([\\|\\s\\r\\n]))");
Matcher matcher = pattern.matcher(yourString);
while (matcher.find()) {
    System.out.println(matcher.group());
}

The split method takes as argument a regular expression so, to use multiple delimiters, you need to input a regular expression separated by the OR regex operator or using a character class (only if the delimiters are single characters).

Using the OR operator:

String delimiters = "\\t|,|;|\\.|\\?|!|-|:|@|\\[|\\]|\\(|\\)|\\{|\\}|_|\\*|/";

Using the character class:

String delimiters = "-\\t,;.?!:@\\[\\{}_*/]";

As you can see some of the characters must be escaped as they are regex metacharacters.

How I would do it if I had to split using two substrings:

String mainString = "This is a dummy string with both_spaces_and_underscores!"
String delimiter1 = " ";
String delimiter2 = "_";
mainString = mainString.replaceAll(delimiter2, delimiter1);
String[] split_string = mainString.split(delimiter1);

Replace all instances of second delimiter with first and split with first.

Note: using replaceAll allows you to use regexp for delimiter2. So, you should actually replace all matches of delimiter2 with some string that matches delimiter1's regexp.

Use brackets

for (String words : input.split("[\\s.,]+"))

Brackets are used when you want any of the characters in the brackets, the + means the characters can be combined one or more times. to create one single delimiter, i.e. space and period or comma and space.