SH Script help. editing string

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

I have a string that looks like this

username|field1|field2|field3

the data has a delimiter of "|"
how can i edit field1, keeping the rest of the data the same
also how can i edit field2 and 3.

2

edit in the sense you want to replace the first field with some other word keeping other intact??
if so use awk

echo "username|field1|field2|field3"|awk -F\| '{print "word|"$2"|"$3"|"$4}'

output will be
word|field1|field2|field3
same way you can do your second question also

3

> edit in the sense you want to replace the first field with some other word keeping other intact??
yup that was what i meant

that is very simple to understand.
thank you very much

4

No need for any external commands:

string="username|field1|field2|field3"
newfield1=something
newstring="$newfield1|${string#*|}"