Technically, a file with elements delimited by '|' characters is a CSV file - the name covers a multitude of separators and most CSV readers allow you to specify the separator character.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comma-separated_values[
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It would be trivial to do a "simple" conversion of your data from '|' to ',' - just read it in, scan for '|' and splat them with a ',' - it doesn't require any inserts or deletes so there is no change in the file length. However, it may be that you need to check the content as well - if the fields between '|' contain ',' and are not surrounded by '"' characters then you will need to replace those as well.
But in most case, you don't need to make any changes at all to read the '|' separated file.