Split string into array without deleting delimiter?

Question

I have a string like

 "asdf a  b c2 " 

And I want to split it into an array like this:

["asdf", " ", "a", " ", " ", "b", " ", "c2", " "] 

Using string.split(" ") removes the spaces, resulting in this:

["asdf", "a", "", "b", "c2"] 

I thought of inserting extra delimiters, e.g.

string.replace(/ /g, "| |").replace(/||/g, "|").split("|"); 

But this gives an unexpected result.

Answer 1

Instead of splitting, it might be easier to think of this as extracting strings comprising either the delimiter or consecutive characters that are not the delimiter:

'asdf a  b c2 '.match(/\S+|\s/g) // result: ["asdf", " ", "a", " ", " ", "b", " ", "c2", " "] 'asdf a  b. . c2% * '.match(/\S+|\s/g) // result: ["asdf", " ", "a", " ", " ", "b.", " ", ".", " ", "c2%", " ", "*", " "] 

A more Shakespearean definition of the matches would be:

'asdf a  b c2 '.match(/ |[^ ]+/g) 

To or (not to )+.