JS regexp to split string based on character not preceded by backslash

Question

I want to use the JS String split function to split this string based only on the commas ,, and not the commas preceded by backslashes /,. How can I do this?

'this,is\,a,\,string'.split(/,/)

This code splits it on all strings, I'm not sure how to get it to split just on the commas not preceded by backslashes.

Answer 1

Since lookbehinds are not supported in JavaScript, it's hard to define "not preceded by something" pattern for split. However, you may define a "word" as a sequence of non-commas or escaped commas:

(?:\\,|[^,])+

(demo: https://regex101.com/r/d5W21v/1)

and extract all "word" matches:

var matches = "this,is\\,a,\\,string".match(/(?:\\,|[^,])+/g);
console.log(matches);