Regular expression alternative for escape character

Question

I want to apply a regex in an SQL query for "a number of non-pipe chars followed by either pipe or end-of-line.
So I use '([^|]*)(\||$)' for this.
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.\

Is there an alternative regex for this that does not use \ ?
Would, for example, '([^|]*)($||)' work?
Or does that also require a backslash, as in '([^|]*)($|\|)'?