regex, extract string NOT between two brackets

Question

OK regex question , how to extract a character NOT between two characters, in this case brackets.

I have a string such as: word1 | {word2 | word3 } | word 4

I only want to get the first and last 'pipe', not the second which is between brackets. I have tried a myriad of attempts with negative carats and negative groupings and can't seem to get it to work.

Basically I am using this regex in a JavaScript split function to split this into an array containing: "word1", "{word2 | word3}", "word4".

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated!

Answer 1

On refiddle.com set to JavaScript, try using this pattern

/|(?![^{]*})/g

with this text

word1 | {word2 | word3 } | word 4 | word 4 | {word2 | word3 }

This should match all of the Pipe symbols that are not inside {}.