Android :: String Split Behavior - Column Contains 15 Elements (Expected 6)

I'm requesting data from my server and receive a string in the form of 2|bit.ly|1||1| and | should be the separator. I thought the following piece of code should do the work

BufferedReader br = null; ...
br = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(inputStream)); ...
String line; String[] columns; ContentValues values;
while((line = br.readLine())!=null) { columns = line.split("|"); ...
}

But after the line.split("|"); the columns contains 15 elements instead of expected 6. Taking a closer look at it's content reveals that each character in the string was stored in one array element. The code coming from server isn't encoded in any way in in the example I use only ASCII characters appear.