Using pipe character as a field separator

Question

I\'m trying different commands to process csv file where the separator is the pipe | character.

While those commands do work when the comma is a separat

Answer 1

You tried "|", [|] and /|. /| does not work because the escape character is \, whereas [] is used to define a range of fields, for example [,-] if you want FS to be either , or -.

To make it work "|" is fine, are you sure you used it this way? Alternativelly, escape it --> \|:

$ echo "he|llo|how are|you" | awk -F"|" '{print $1}'
he
$ echo "he|llo|how are|you" | awk -F\| '{print $1}'
he
$ echo "he|llo|how are|you" | awk 'BEGIN{FS="|"} {print $1}'
he

But then note that when you say:

print a[$2] [|] $4 [|] $5

so you are not using any delimiter at all. As you already defined OFS, do:

print a[$2], $4, $5

Example:

$ cat a
he|llo|how are|you
$ awk 'BEGIN {FS=OFS="|"} {print $1, $3}' a
he|how are