Don't forget that if you split it and want to recreate it (as the OP seems to want to do), you should use the "-1" flag to split so as not to lose any blank fields at the end.

$ perl -e 'print join("::", split q"\|", q"OBX|foo|blah|||"),$/'
OBX::foo::blah
$ perl -e 'print join("::", split q"\|", q"OBX|foo|blah|||", -1),$/'
OBX::foo::blah::::::
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