Js advanced string split

Question

I have a long string from a .txt-file, containing several sentences and dates that I want to split up.

The syntax is like this

01-01-15: Here is some text
02-01-15: Here is some other text
05-06-17: Here is some new text
06-06-17: Here is some text
taking up 
several lines
07-06-17: And so on

Since some of the sentences take up several lines I cannot use text.split("\n") - but what can I do instead then? All sentences start with xx-xx-xx where x is a number.

• Suren Srapyan: You can have a special symbol after at the end of each sentence and split by them
• Tim Johnson: The Javascript 'split' function as you are using above can take a regular expression to split on (See developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/…) . A quick google should help you if your unfamiliar with the syntax. If you wish to test there are many regex tester sites (such as regextester.com)
• T.J. Crowder: Possible duplicate of stackoverflow.com/questions/28633948/…
• Stephan: (How) can you be sure, that the sentences don't contain dates after new lines by chance?
• Parveen Sachdeva: Possible duplicate of Split using RegEx in JavaScript

Answer 1

You could split the lines by searching for the starting date of each logical unit with a lookahead pattern.

var data = '01-01-15: Here is some text\
02-01-15: Here is some other text\
05-06-17: Here is some new text\
06-06-17: Here is some text\
taking up \
several lines\
07-06-17: And so on';
console.log(data.split(/(?=\d\d-\d\d-\d\d:)/));

• T.J. Crowder: Exactly what I came up with, except I used \d{2}. \d\d is probably clearer.