I have some version of AWK that does not support regular expression field separators ( neither do I have nawk or gawk). How do I go about reading a line with the field separator as either the string "=#" or "+=".

My data looks like this:

abhishek=#nnnnn+#1234+#87


One option is to use tr and change "=" to "+" (I am sure "=" doesnt appear anywhere else), but since the file is rather large,and there are a lot of operations I was planning to do on the fields,while I was reading the file line by line, I would refrain from using it.

Any suggestions please?