No offense taken slide! These forums are here to help and after reading your post I now understand the problem better. I respect that fact that you took timeout to reply and to evaluate what was said.

 With that said, I concur with the reasoning that my regex will fail. There are actually two problems with the CSV file

1) Null values are not delimited by | such as ||,
2) Actual values are not delimited by | such as 1234,|abc,def|.

 The advice I would give for the user, besides the real advice of throw it back at the data provider and cry foul, is to create a program to normalize the data to expected norms. At that point it falls outside of Regex.

Sorry for the late reply...work/life got in my way.

Again thanks for looking into it!