Search/replace pipe delimited files with TextPipe Pro

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To fix Pipe files, you need to restrict changes to individual fields so you don't change data you didn't intend to.

ONLY TextPipe allows you to restrict changes to Pipe fields in massive files. Restrictions can also be applied to line ranges, column ranges, tab/CSV fields and much more.

Easily handle Pipe-delimited files with TextPipe™ Pro, our a multi-award winning, industrial strength text conversion, transformation, cleansing and extraction workbench. Since it's so easy (How?) to and from Tab-delimited with TextPipe, you can make use of our extensive range of Tab-delimited field handing filters-

• Convert Tab-delimited to CSV (comma delimited), pipe-delimited (|) or semi-colon (;) delimited
• Convert Tab-delimited to XML (using the column headers as XML field names if required)
• Add new Tab-delimited fields using the Add Left Margin or Add Right Margin filters
• Add a header line using the Add Header filter
• Move, copy or re-order Tab-delimited fields
• Convert between Unix, PC and Mainframe end-of-line formats
• Restrict changes to line ranges, column ranges, tab fields and much more (see white paper here)
• Convert between Mainframe EBCDIC and PC/Unix ASCII representations (see white paper here)
• Remove multiple white space
• Remove Tab-delimited fields
• Remove an existing header line
• Remove or extract lines matching a pattern or a code
• Split files that might be too large for a third party application to handle
• Merge multiple Tab-delimited files together
• Write custom code filters in VBScript or JScript
• Handles files of unlimited size - even larger than 10 GB!
• Can be fully automated or scripted

Filter to Fix Embedded New Lines

If your pipe delimited file has embedded new lines in it, use this filter to convert it to CSV.

Filter download

How to Convert Pipe Delimited Files

To convert Pipe Delimited (|) files to Tab Delimited (\t), follow these steps:

1. Start TextPipe Pro
2. Add a Search and Replace filter by double-clicking Filters\Replace\Find exactly
3. In the Find box, type '|', and in the Replace with box, type '\t' - this is how tab characters are represented
4. Now drag and drop your file into TextPipe's window and it will appear in the Files List
5. Click Go (at the base of the window).

To convert Tab Delimited files back to Pipe Delimited, just Replace '\t' with '|' in Step 3. To convert to and from Comma Delimited, just use a ',' instead of '\t'.