Splitting a String (especially in Java with java.util.regex or something else) ...

Question

Does anyone know how to split a string on a character taking into account its escape sequence?

For example, if the character is ':', "a:b" is split into two parts ("a" and "b"), whereas "a\:b" is not split at all.

I think this is hard (impossible?) to do with regular expressions.

Thank you in advance,

Kedar

Answer 1

(?<=^|[^\\]): gets you close, but doesn't address escaped slashes. (That's a literal regex, of course you have to escape the slashes in it to get it into a java string)

(?<=(^|[^\\])(\\\\)*): How about that? I think that should satisfy any ':' that is preceded by an even number of slashes.

Edit: don't vote this up. MizardX's solution is better :)