title: Separate a string into a pair of substrings at a special character sequence
body: <p>I want to get two string values separated by a special character.
  For example, say user types in a search query like</p>
  <pre><code>japanese-&gt;chinese (or with spaces japanese -&gt; chinese).
  </code></pre>
  <ul>
  <li>the spaces between the arrow should not matter. I should still get 'japanese' , 'chinese' even if theres' multiple spaces between the arrow and the two string</li>
  </ul>
  <p>The whole string 'japanese -&gt; chinese' will be sent.
  From that string, I want to retrieve individual string 'japanese' and 'chinese' to perform some search logic. How would I do that with javascript ? is this possible through regex?</p>