Problem with positional output

Hello *,


after 4 years of Linux/OSS abstinence I am back and I run into troubles,
because I have forgotten ho to get values from a string...




The string has 4 parameters, deperated by the | sign and I like  to  get
it with something like


     echo "${RETVAL}" |sed 's!(.*)|(.*)|(.*)!$1!'


but it does not work.  also I have tried %1 and \1.


Can someone enlight me please?


Oh, i have sed1line.txt downloaded, but this info is not included.


Have a nice day/evening


-- 
Michelle Konzack        ITSystems
GNU/Linux Developer     0033-6-61925193