Question

I have following string:

;Spe \,\:\; cial;;;

and I want to split it with semicolon as delimiter, however semicolon preceded by “\” should not be counted as delimiter. So I would like to get something like

["", "Spe \,\:\; cial", "", "", ""]

Update:

Java representation looks like:

String s = ";Spe \\,\\:\\; cial;;;";

Answer 1

Use a negative look-behind:

(?<!\\\\);

(Note that there’s really only a single \ in this expression — ie, the expression should be (?<!\); — but the backslash character has to be double-escaped: once for the benefit of the Java compiler, and again for the benefit of the regex engine.)