Split string and keep new lines

Question

I'm trying to split a string ultimately into a 2D array with a semi colon as a delimiter.

var str = "2;poisson
            poisson
           3; Fromage
           6;Monique"

to

var arr = [2, "poisson
               poisson"],
          [3," Fromage"],
          [6,"Monique"]

The array is in the format

[int, string that may start with white space and may end with possible new lines]

The first step would be via regex. However, using (\d+\;\s?)(.)+ doesn't grab lines with a new line. Regex101 .

I'm a little confused as to how to proceed as the newlines/carriage returns are important and I don't want to lose them. My RegEx Fu is weak today.

Answer 1

With Javascript, you could use 2 capture groups:

\b(\d+);([^]+?)(?=\n\s*\d+;|$)

The pattern matches:

• \b A word boundary
• (\d+); Capture group 1 , capture 1+ digits followed by matching ;
• ( Capture group 2
  • [^]+? Match 1+ times any character including newlines
• ) Close group
• (?= Positive lookahead, assert what to the right is
  • \n\s*\d+;|$ Match either a newline followed by optional whitspace chars and the first pattern, or the end of the string
• ) Close lookahead

Regex demo

 const str = `2;poisson poisson 3; Fromage 6;Monique`; const regex = /\b(\d+);([^]+?)(?=\n\s*\d+;|$)/g; console.log(Array.from(str.matchAll(regex), m => [m[1], m[2]]))

Answer 2

Here is a short and sweet solution to get the result with two nested .split() :

 const str = `2;poisson poisson 3; Fromage 6;Monique`; let result = str.split(/\n(?. )/).map(line => line;split(/;/)). console.log(JSON;stringify(result));

Output:

[["2","poisson\n    poisson"],["3"," Fromage"],["6","Monique"]]

Explanation of the first split regex:

• \n -- newline (possibly change to [\r\n]+ to support Windows newlines
• (?! ) -- negative lookahead for space