title: regex, extract string NOT between two brackets
body: <p>OK regex question , how to extract a character NOT between two characters, in this case brackets.</p>
  
  <p>I have a string such as:
  word1 | {word2 | word3 } | word 4</p>
  
  <p>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.</p>
  
  <p>Basically I am using this regex in a JavaScript split function to split this into an array containing: "word1", "{word2 | word3}", "word4".</p>
  
  <p>Any assistance would be greatly appreciated!</p>