I need to break the following string into seperate 8 seperate groups

 "key:val:key:val:key:val:key:val"

I really want to avoid using this ugly regex

([^:]*):([^:]*):([^:]*):([^:]*):([^:]*):([^:]*):([^:]*):([^:]*)

So i've tried using a passive group and a quantifier

(?:([^:]*):){1,6}([^\s])+
 

The problem is that its fine on the Jakarta regex implementation but when its run using the Java implementation I lose the groups. Is there a way of doing this which will work in both cases?

Help would be greatly appreciated!