in reply to Easy Split

First split on the pattern /[^\\]:/. This gives you the correct grouping, but leaves you with spurious \:. You can use map and s/// to delete them too, i.e.

map { s/\\://g } split(...)
For completeness: This would fail if a colon can be the very first character in your string.

-- 
Ronald Fischer <ynnor@mm.st>