Question

I’m trying to clean a file and make it pipe or tilde delimited

the file has text qualifiers sporadically throughout

like:

jim,jones,"123 Main St",Detroit,MI
connie,hill,"1234 Front St","St Marie, Detwa",WI

I would like to strip all the quotes and replace the delimiters without interfering with commas within fields.

Answer 1

If your data is in fact CSV, then the easiest way would probably be the following:

$data = Import-Csv csvdata.txt # -Header Name,LastName,Street,City,State # if no headers are there
$data | %{ ($_.Name,$_.LastName,$_.Street,$_.City,$_.State) -join '|' } | Out-File new.txt

This leverages PowerShell’s native CSV import to build a list of objects with properties. You can then manually create the lines again with your own delimiter (necessary since Export-CSV will quote every field, always).