Regex Splitting with Negative Lookbehind

Question

The string I am trying to split:

string1, string2, string\\,3, string4

I want to split the above string on each comma, except when the comma is escaped with a backslash.

I am unable to utilize negative lookbehind in my JavaScript.

My attempt:

var splits = "string1, string2, string\\,3, string4".split("(?<!\\\\\\\\),");

None of the commas are being recognized.

Potential solutions: after research, I stumbled across this SO question. However, I don't understand the workarounds well enough to change the above code to the replace the use case.

Answer 1

You may use

s.match(/(?:[^,\\]|\\.)+/g)

See the regex demo . It will match 1 or more chars other than comma and backslash, or any char that is escaped with a literal backslash.

Note that the string literal should have a double backslash to define a literal backslash.

 var splits = "string1, string2, string\\\\,3, string4".match(/(?:[^,\\\\]|\\\\.)+/g); console.log(splits);