sed to Find and Replace chacters between two strings

Question

I have a pipe delimited file where some values/records in one of the columns contain pipes in the value itself making it appear as though there are more columns than there actually are - Notice how "column 8" (bolded) has pipes in the middle. This should actually display as "|col u lm n8|" with spaces in place of the pipes.

column1|column2|column3|column4|column5|column6|column7|**col|u|lm|n8**|2016|column10|column11|column12|column13|column14|

I need to replace these pipe's within column8 with spaces.

Good thing is that the data in column7 and column9 (|2016) is the same across the file so I'm able to do a sed such as this

sed 's/|/ /7g;s/.\(|2016\)/|\1/' 

However that will change all pipes after the 7th pipe to the end of the line. My question is how can I get it to change all pipes to spaces after the 7th pipe but up to the "|2016" column ?

Thank you

Answer 1

With your sample input this works for me with GNU sed 4.2.2:

sed -r ':start s/(column7.)([^\|]*?)\|(.*?.2016)/\1\2 \3/; t start' file

It replaces pipes between column7. and .2016, one pipe at a time. After an successful substitution, the t gotos back to the :start label for another substitution attempt.