How to use cut with multiple character delimiter? unix

Question

My file looks like this

abc ||| xyz ||| foo bar
hello world ||| spam ham jam ||| blah blah

I want to extract a specific column, e.g. I could have done:

sed 's/\s|||\s/\\t/g' file | cut -f1

But is there other way of doing that?

Answer 1

Since | is a valid regex expression, it need to be escaped \\| or put in square brackets [|]

You can do this:

awk -F' \\|\\|\\| ' '{print $1}' file

Some other variation that work as well

awk -F' [|][|][|] ' '{print "$1"}' file
awk -F' [|]{3} ' '{print "$1"}' file
awk -F' \\|{3} ' '{print "$1"}' file
awk -F' \\|+ ' '{print "$1"}' file
awk -F' [|]+ ' '{print "$1"}' file

\ as separator does not work well in square brackets, only escaping, and many escape :)

cat file
abc \\\ xyz \\\ foo bar

Example: 4 \ for every \ in the expression, so 12 \ totalt.

awk -F' \\\\\\\\\\\\ ' '{print $2}' file
xyz

or

awk -F' \\\\{3} ' '{print $2}' file
xyz

or this but not much simpler

awk -F' [\\\\]{3} ' '{print $2}' file
xyz

awk -F' [\\\\][\\\\][\\\\] ' '{print $2}' file
xyz

Answer 2

You can use awk to do it -

$ awk 'BEGIN {FS=" \|\|\| ";}{print $1}' file

Replace $1 with $2, $3, etc.