How to split a string by nth intervals of alphabetical characters while also separating specific characters?

If we have a

string s = 'abcdxefyghijxlm'

I can split it by 2 characters using

s.match(/.{1,2}/g)

and I will get

['ab', 'cd', 'xe', 'fy', 'gh', 'ij', 'xl', 'm']

How would I split it this way while at the same time isolating specific characters 'x' and 'y'?

For the example above, I would like to get the following result

['ab', 'cd', 'x', 'ef', 'y', 'gh', 'ij', 'x', 'lm']

EDIT

I forgot to mention that I am only targetting alphabetical characters to be split into pairs except x and y. So currently, the regex I have above does not actually work for when I have something like s = '{"abcd":"12"}' as it will result to

 ['{"', 'ab', 'cd', '":', '"1, '2"', '}']

instead of

 [ '{', '"', 'ab', 'cd', '"', ':', '"', '1', '2', '"', '}']

Answer

Use an alternation (this|that): /[a-wz]{2}|./g

That looks for:

• [a-wy] – any two characters of the English alphabet except x and y, or
• . – any single character

Alternations choose the first that matches, so this will prefer [a-wz]{2} over . where both match.

Example:

Live Example:

let s = "abcdxefyghijxlm{"abcd":"12"}";

console.log(s.match(/[a-wz]{2}|./g));

.as-console-wrapper {
    max-height: 100% !important;
}

Note: The above is case sensitive. If you don’t want that, add the i flag: /[a-wz]{2}|./gi