Question

I have a string like this

BRADI5G20430|BRADI5G20430.1||1

How can I replace the bar (single and multiple) with tab (“\t”)?
I tried this but dont’ work

sed 's/\|+/\t/g'

I also want to include this line in bash script.

Answer 1

you need to escape the +

$ sed 's/|\+/\t/g' file
BRADI5G20430    BRADI5G20430.1  1

or you can use -r option of sed, but this time, the + will be “one or more” and you need to escape the “|” since in regex, it means alternation.

$ sed -r 's/\|+/\t/g' file
BRADI5G20430    BRADI5G20430.1  1

or use awk, set field separator to “|” and then set output field separator OFS to tab \t

eg

$ awk -F"|" '{$1=$1}1' OFS="\t" file
BRADI5G20430    BRADI5G20430.1          1

this replaces each tab with “|”. If you want to replace all “|” with one tab

$ awk '{gsub(/\|+/,"\t")}1' file
BRADI5G20430    BRADI5G20430.1  1