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ViewsSplit Down Unescaped Character in Javascript
I have a period and backslash escaped string. I would like to split the string using any unescaped periods, but am struggling to come up with a pattern to do so.
const escaped = "two slashes: \\\\.one period: \..line and a dot: \\\.";
// ["two slashes: \\", "one period: .", "line and a dot: \."]
console.log(escaped.split(/* ? */))
This (?<!\\)(?:(\\\\)*)[*] is close, but split() includes capturing groups in the ouput array, which is not what I would like. The solution should be match-only, like here:
(?<!\\)(?:\\\\)*\K\.
1 answers
Answer question0
The positive lookbehind solution will work with any JavaScript environment compatible with ECMAScript 2018+ standard:
/(?<=(?<!\\)(?:\\\\)*)\./
See this regex demo.
The regex matches any . char that is immediately preceded with any amount of an even amount of backslashes (i.e. even if there are no backslashes before . at all).
With older JavaScript environment, you will need a workaround like text.match(/(?:\\[^]|[^\\.])+/g). See this regex demo. This matches any one or more sequences of a a \ and any single char or any single letter other than a backslash and a dot.