print columns with spaces

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Hi All

I've a file which is similar to the one given below

column1	coulmn2	column3	column4
A	            B	            C	            D
		                    X	            Y
F	            	            G	            H

I would like to get it in this format

A|B|C|D
||X|Y
F||G|H

Is this possible using sed or gawk?

2

DELETED

3 
gawk 'NF==4{t=gensub(/[^ ]+( +).*/,"\\1",1,$0)}{gsub(t,"|");gsub(/ +/,"|")}1'
4

Assuming the white space is a tab ...

$ tr "\t" "|" < file
column1|coulmn2|column3|column4
A|B|C|D
||X|Y
F||G|H
5

Thanks a lot fpmurphy and yinyuemi.

I got it working by using sed itself.

I was not able to use gawk since i'm running it on Windows, it gave me error

gawk: cmd. line:1: 'NF==4{t=gensub(/[
gawk: cmd. line:1: ^ Invalid char ''' in expression (i think it is because windows don't like ')

tr is not working because the file is having multiple spaces (not tabs, i was thinking it was tab).

Thank you very much for your inputs.