Editing Vertical bar (section)

====Delimiter====
Although not as common as commas or tabs, the vertical bar can be used as a [[delimiter]] in a [[flat file]]. Examples of a [[pipe delimited|pipe-delimited]] standard data format are [[LEDES]] 1998B and [[HL7]]. It is frequently used because vertical bars are typically uncommon in the data itself.

Similarly, the vertical bar may see use as a delimiter for [[regular expression]] operations (e.g. in [[sed]]). This is useful when the regular expression contains instances of the more common forward slash (<code>/</code>) delimiter; using a vertical bar eliminates the need to escape all instances of the forward slash. However, this makes the bar unusable as the regular expression "alternative" operator.