python to change '|' into tab delimenated

Question

I need to replace '|' into tab so that I can analyze my human annotation genomic data (200+mb). I'm a research assistant learning how to analyze/manipulate sequencing data in the easiest/simplest way so that I can replicate this on more data.

Here how my data looks like. There are ~400,000 lines of this type of data in one file.

       ANN=C|downstream_gene_variant|MODIFIER|OR4G4P|ENSG00000268020|transcript|ENST00000606857|unprocessed_pseudogene||n.*1414T>C|||||1414|,C|intron_variant|MODIFIER|OR4G4P|ENSG00000268020|transcript|ENST00000594647|unprocessed_pseudogene|1/1|n.20-104T>C||||||;DP=11;SS=1;VT=SNP

I tried to use this code to replace '|' into '\t' for several lines.

import csv
infile = 'Book2.xlsx'
with open(infile , 'r') as inf: 
    for line in inf:    
        w =csv.writer(inf, delimiter = '\t')
        print w

All I'm getting is this :

<_csv.writer object at 0x7f8beebaafc8>
<_csv.writer object at 0x7f8beebaafc8>
<_csv.writer object at 0x7f8beebaafc8>
<_csv.writer object at 0x7f8beebaafc8>
<_csv.writer object at 0x7f8beebaafc8>
<_csv.writer object at 0x7f8beebaafc8>
<_csv.writer object at 0x7f8beebaafc8>
<_csv.writer object at 0x7f8beebaafc8>
<_csv.writer object at 0x7f8beebaafc8>
<_csv.writer object at 0x7f8beebaafc8>
<_csv.writer object at 0x7f8beebaafc8>
<_csv.writer object at 0x7f8beebaafc8>
<_csv.writer object at 0x7f8beebaafc8>
<_csv.writer object at 0x7f8beebaafc8>
<_csv.writer object at 0x7f8beebaafc8>
<_csv.writer object at 0x7f8beebaafc8>
<_csv.writer object at 0x7f8beebaafc8>
<_csv.writer object at 0x7f8beebaafc8>
<_csv.writer object at 0x7f8beebaafc8>

Answer 1

Try using regular expression. Example for one line:

a = "ANN=C|downstream_gene_variant|MODIFIER|OR4G4P|ENSG00000268020|transcript|ENST00000606857|unprocessed_pseudogene||n.*1414T>C|||||1414|,C|intron_variant|MODIFIER|OR4G4P|ENSG00000268020|transcript|ENST00000594647|unprocessed_pseudogene|1/1|n.20-104T>C||||||;DP=11;SS=1;VT=SNP"


import re
regex= re.compile(r'\|')
regex.sub("\t",a)