Question

How could I use sed to find all lines that don’t have exactly 35 occurrences of the “|” character?

If I can’t use sed, what could I use?

Answer 1

I’d use awk as it’s more readable and doesn’t involve nasty regular expression syntax:

awk -F'|' 'NF != 36' filename

Or grep:

grep -v '^\([^|]*|\)\{35\}[^|]*$' filename

But if you want to use sed:

sed '/^\([^|]*|\)\{35\}[^|]*$/d' filename