title: Regular expression alternative for escape character
body: <p>I want to apply a regex in an SQL query for &quot;a number of non-pipe chars followed by either pipe or end-of-line.<br />
  So I use <code>'([^|]*)(\||$)'</code> for this.<br />
  Unluckily I am using a tool for running the query and that tool removes backslashes from the text I feed it - so the regex fails.\</p>
  <p>Is there an alternative regex for this that does not use \ ?<br />
  Would, for example, <code>'([^|]*)($||)'</code> work?<br />
  Or does that also require a backslash, as in <code>'([^|]*)($|\|)'</code>?</p>