Of course this is overkill - you could just escape it with a backslash.

I don't think it's overkill. Look carefully at the OP's code. If you'd told him just to back-whack his pipe, he probably would've repsonded with "that didn't work either" because he probably would have done $delimiter = "\|";

I think your response was just perfect. If only I'd hit the "create" button on my reply immediately rather than doing Real Work instead I'd've been first! Now I'm just lost in the shuffle ;-)