Regular expression to remove the last column from a pipe delimited file.

Question

I've got a file with 1000's of entries and 131 columns, the columns are pipe delimited. There is no pipe at the end so format is something like.

2010-10-04|Security|AMEND|20162214| ... lots more columns ... |Bloomberg

How can I remove the last column of the file say in Vim ?

Answer 1

This regular expression will catch the last column: \|[^|]+$

Answer 2

I would just use cut, or awk at a push

Answer 3

Tou need

%s/|[^|]*$// 

Note I am using [^|]* to allow for an empty column.

Answer 4

Another way:

:%s/.*\zs|.*//