Multiple Character separator for awk command

Question

I have the data as below:

p_id^|^data1^|^data2^|^data3

I need to get the 2nd field only

data1

Tried multiple tricks with awk command, but unable to find it out. Can someone please help.

Answer 1

Since the separator contains more than one character and all of them are special (both ^ and | are regular expression operators), you need to escape them. On the command line, you would do this with

awk -F '\\^\\|\\^' '{ print $2 }' file

You need the double backslashes to escape the backslashes themselves too (for a different reason).