Regular Expression to find more than two occurrences of a character between delimiters

Question

I have a set of large data files that I need to bulk load into a database. The data lines are pipe | delimited but also use inverted commas " to delineate text entries. The problem is that many of the blocks of text also include one or more additional " characters other than the ones at the beginning / end of the field, which is breaking the import.

I'm looking to find a regular expression that will allow me to find lines in the file that contain more than two " characters between each set of || delimiters.

For example

123|"Mr Smith"|456|"No extra inverted commas, This line is fine"|789

123|"Mr Jones"|456|"This one has "extra inverted commas", not so good"|789

123|"Mr Jones"|456|"Even one additional " is a bit of an issue"|789

I need to find lines which are like the second and third one above.

Any assistance appreciated!

Thanks

Answer 1

It can be done by piping the output to awk as below. It is assumed that pipe in input does appear at the start and end of each line.

| awk -F'|' 'BEGIN{OFS="|";}{ \
  for (i = 1; i <= NF; i++) { \
    if (gsub(/"/, "\"", $i) > 2) { \
      print; break; \
    }; \
  }; \
}'