Awk Field Separators

[Sharon Cubbage]

Does anybody know how to specify more than one field separator in Awk?
I would like to specify to an Awk program to treat single spaces as well
as bars as field separators so that a string such as :

12 12 12 34|34|34

will be said to have 6 fields.  I've tried to create a regular expression
to handle both cases but it hasn't been working.

Any hints?

Thanks!
Sharon