Question

What is a regex I can write in bash for parsing a line and extracting text that can be found between two | (so that would be ex: 1: |hey| 2: |boy|) and keeping those words in some sort of array?

Answer 1

no need complicated regular expression. Split on “|”, then every 2nd element is what you want

#!/bin/bash
declare -a array
s="|hey| 2: |boy|"
IFS="|"
set -- $s
array=($@)
for((i=1;i<=${#array[@]};i+=2))
do
 echo ${array[$i]}
done

output

$ ./shell.sh
hey
boy

using awk

$ echo s="|hey| 2: |boy|" |  awk -F"|" '{for(i=2;i<=NF;i+=2)print $i}'
hey
boy