print text between pipes-CodePudding

I have a text file with ids as below

ref|XP_029641976.1|
ref|XP_014779594.1|
gb|KOF78315.1|

I wish to print only the text between pipes and I've tried this sed -n '/|/,/|/p and also tried substituting but they don't work. The string in front of the first pipe varies. Any ideas? Thank you

CodePudding user response：

You can get text between pipes with sed regexp like this

#!/bin/bash

echo "ref|XP_029641976.1|
ref|XP_014779594.1|
gb|KOF78315.1|" | sed -E "s:.*\|(.*?)\|:\1:g"

CodePudding user response：

As others have suggested, awk is a good candidate for this:

awk -F'|' '{ print $2 }' file

Specify the field delimiter with -F and then print the second pipe delimited field with $2