I want to split a semicolon-separated test string with a regular expression in C#.
I know I could use for this example the string split method but the pattern and input string is a bit more complicated and I want to keep it simple.

This is the pattern:

string pattern = @"(?:^|;)(([^;]*|)(?=;|$))";`

And this is the test string:

string input = @"text1;text2;text3;;text5";

The match results are:

[0] text1
[1] text2
[2] text3
[3] 
[4] text5

And this looks good to me!

But if I change the test string to:

string input = @";text2;text3;;text5";

then I get these results:

[0] 
[1] text3
[2] 
[3] text5`

So my questions are:
Why is it a problem for the C# engine when the test string starts with an empty string?
Even if the engine cannot return the first empty string, where is text2?
And what do I have to change that it also works in C#?

You can test it on Regex101. And you can see the difference of the engines if you switch on the left side between PCRE2 and .NET 7.