need a shell script to change the comma delimiter to a pipe delimeter

Question

My input looks like "$130.00","$2,200.00","$1,230.63" and so on My question is how can I go about changing the comma delimiter to a | delimiter without getting rid of the comma in the actual input. Just to clarify this input is in a csv file with 40 columns and 9500 rows. I want my output to look like

"$130.00"|"$2,200.00"|"$1,230.63"

Answer 1

To do this reliably, you have to use states to keep track of wether you are inside a string or not. The following perl script should work:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use warnings;

my $state_outside_string = 0;
my $state_inside_string  = 1;

my $state = $state_outside_string;

while (my $line = <>) {
    my @chars = split(//,$line);
    foreach my $char (@chars) {
        if ($char eq '"') {
            if ($state == $state_outside_string) {
                $state = $state_inside_string;
            } else {
                $state = $state_outside_string;
            }
        } elsif ($char eq ',') {
            if ($state == $state_outside_string) {
                print '|';
                next;
            }
        }
        print $char;
    }
}