Vim replacing linefeeds

Question

I resisted Vim, but have now given in. It works large files like a hot knife through butter.

Situation: I have a large text file, I want to put a pipe character at the beginning and ending of each line.

Problem: These Vims and other variations didn't work:

:%s/$/|\$|
:%s/\r/|\r|
:%s/$/|\r|

I suspect it's something simple to fix this, but searching Google and Stack didn't help.

Answer 1

You nearly had it:

:%s/^\|$/|/g

^\|$ means beginning or end of line. In a Vim regex, the | "or" pipe gets escaped. That is followed by /|/g -- replace with | globally.