Well, your method uses regular expressions too, they're just arguments to the split() routine. BTW, your second split won't work quite right as | is special in regular expressions and the first argument to split is always a regular expression (except for the one special case of ' ').

Also, it appears from the problem description that a pipe symbol also separates individual records, so your solution won't quite do the right thing anyway. But, I suspect that the original poster left something out when he said

The only constant is the placement of the "::" and the "|".

as it looks like the number of things is also constant (otherwise why use such a restrictive RE?). So, it may be that a plain-jane pattern match with captures is the Right Way for this particular problem.