Question

I have the next text

 aaa|bbbb|cccc|dddd\|eeee|ffff

and i want to split by | and excluding when | is preceded by \ and obtain

aaa

bbbb

cccc

dddd\|eeee

ffff

Thanks.

ps : i tried using some regexp generator (for example http://txt2re.com/ ) but frankly regexp is anything but friendly.

update: finally i give up. Regexp is not fast (i did a benchmark), neither is clear (in comparison with a function that everybody can follow), then i skip it and now i am using real code.

Answer 1

Tried to add this as a comment to eyelidlessness’s answer, but don’t know how to format it there…

Anyhow, eyelidlessness answer looks correct to me:

    String str = "aaa|bbbb|cccc|dddd\\|eeee|ffff";
    String[] tokens = str.split("(?<!\\\\)\\|");
    System.out.println(Arrays.toString(tokens));    

which prints:

[aaa, bbbb, cccc, dddd\|eeee, ffff]