Shell Programming and Scripting

sed 's/ /@#/g' f1|  sed 's/"|"/" "/g' | 
awk '
{
for(i=1;i<NF;++i)
        if(match($i,/^\"[^|"]*\"$/)) 
        {
                gsub(/\"/,"",$i)
                gsub(/@#/," ",$i)
                printf("%s|",$i)
        }
        else
        {
                gsub(/@#/," ",$i)
                printf("%s|",$i)
        }
if(match($NF,/^\"[^|"]*\"$/)) 
{
        gsub(/\"/,"",$NF)
        gsub(/@#/," ",$i)
        printf("%s\n",$NF)
}
else
{
        gsub(/@#/," ",$NF)
        printf("%s\n",$NF)
}
}'

"abc"|"123"|"456"|"def"

all = open("file.txt").readlines()
store = [] #to keep results
for items in all:
	items = items.strip()	#strip newlines
	for s in items.split('|'):
		if s.count('"') == 2 and  s[0] == '"' and s[-1] == '"': #eg "abc" -> abc
			s = s.replace('"','')
		store.append(s) #store result
	print '|'.join(store) #print result
	store =[] #reinit storage

/home> python test.py
|||||||USA||"AB|C"||""XYZ"A"BCD"||||""PPPPP""|LLLLLL