title: Using multiple delimiters when one of them is a pipe character
body: <p>I have a text file where fields are separated by a pipe character.  Since it is a human readable text, there are spaces used for column alignment.</p>
  
  <p>Here is a sample input:</p>
  
  <pre><code>+------------------------------------------+----------------+------------------+
  |  Column1  |   Column2    |   Column3     |    Column4     |   Last Column    |
  +------------------------------------------+----------------+------------------+
  | some_text |  other_text  |  third_text   |   fourth_text  |  last_text       |
  &lt;more such lines&gt;
  +------------------------------------------+----------------+------------------+
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>How can I use awk to extract the third field in this case?  The
  I tried:</p>
  
  <pre><code>awk -F '[ |]' '{print $3}' file
  awk -F '[\|| ]' '{print $3}' file
  awk -F '[\| ]' '{print $3}' file
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>The expected result is:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;blank&gt;
  Column3
  &lt;more column 3 values&gt;
  &lt;blank&gt;
  third_text
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I am trying to achieve this with a single awk command.  Isn't that possible?</p>
  
  <p>The following post talks about using pipe as a delimiter in awk but it doesn't talk about the case of multiple delimiters where one of them is a pipe character:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li><a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27246584/using-pipe-character-as-a-field-separator">Using pipe character as a field separator</a></li>
  </ul>