Regex to split string into array where numeral exists followed by space, but skip over numerals that don't have a space after them

Consider the string below;

1 The dog is big 2 The dog is sitting on the sofa 3 The dog was born on the 4th of July 4 The dog is named Henry

I want to break this up where numerals exist followed by a space, gathering the number and everything after it up until the next numeral followed by a space. I'm using the regex \s*\d+\D+ which works, except when there's a numeral in the middle of the sentence NOT followed by a space (in this case, 4th). So, I want to get this:

["1 The dog is big","2 The dog is sitting on the sofa","3 The dog was born on the 4th of July","4 The dog is named Henry"]

but instead I get this:

["1 The dog is big","2 The dog is sitting on the sofa","3 The dog was born on the","4th of July","4 The dog is named Henry"]

How would I achieve this, bearing in mind that I'm hoping to avoid lookahead clauses because I'm using safari and they just don't work on safari?

Solution

You might be able to use the following match() approach:

var input = "1 The dog is big 2 The dog is sitting on the sofa 3 The dog was born on the 4th of July 4 The dog is named Henry";
var parts = input.match(/\b\d+(?: \w+)+?(?=\s+\d+\b|$)/gi);
console.log(parts);

The regex pattern used here matches each numbered item as:

\b\d+ match a leading number
(?: \w+)+? match one or more words, until
(?=\s+\d+\b|$) looking ahead and seeing the next nearest number OR the end of the input