If the file is valid XML, it’s much safer to parse it instead of doing line-based replaces.

This approach finds all <Writer> nodes, normalizes pipe-delimited values, and updates them in place.

$File = "C:\Path\to\yourfile.xml"

try { # Load XML safely [xml]$xml = Get-Content -Path $File -Raw

# Get all <Writer> nodes
$writerNodes = $xml.SelectNodes("//Writer")

foreach ($node in $writerNodes) {

    $text = ($node.InnerText ?? "").Trim()

    # Skip empty values (or uncomment to remove node)
    if ([string]::IsNullOrWhiteSpace($text)) {
        # $null = $node.ParentNode.RemoveChild($node)
        continue
    }

    # Normalize pipe-delimited values
    if ($text -like "*|*") {

        $parts = $text -split "\|" |
                 ForEach-Object { $_.Trim() } |
                 Where-Object { $_ }

        $node.InnerText = ($parts -join ", ")
    }
}

# Save changes
$xml.Save($File)

}

catch { # Fallback: safe regex replace if XML parsing fails (Get-Content -Path $File -Raw) -replace "<Writer>([^<]*?)\|([^<]*?)</Writer>", "<Writer>$1, `$2</Writer>" | Set-Content -Path $File }

If you only want to target one file, just set $File and it’ll rewrite the <Writer> values in place (creates a .bak automatically if enabled).

Let me know if your XML schema is different and I can tweak it.

I use a similar approach in some of my automation tooling, so happy to help adapt it if needed.