Regex negative lookbehind in Ruby doesn't seem to work

Question

Making an argument parser. I want to split a string into an array where the delimiter is \", \" except when preceded by \"|\". That means string

Answer 1

Ruby's regex engine doesn't support lookbehind (yet).

You'd need to switch to 1.9 or use Oniguruma.

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If that's not an option, you can search for |, and replace it with some sort of marker. After all is said and done, put the |, back.

You can also try a regex like:

/(?:[^|]), /

But obviously the (?:[^|]) is not zero-width, which means you'll need to do some extra work afterwards.