Why does sed fail with International characters and how to fix?
I think the error occurs if the input encoding of the file is different from the preferred encoding of your environment.
Example: in is UTF-8
$ LANG=de_DE.UTF-8 sed 's/.*| //' < inXY$ LANG=de_DE.iso88591 sed 's/.*| //' < inX YUTF-8 can safely be interpreted as ISO-8859-1, you'll get strange characters but apart from that everything is fine.
Example: in is ISO-8859-1
$ LANG=de_DE.UTF-8 sed 's/.*| //' < inXGras Och Stenar Trad - From MöY$ LANG=de_DE.iso88591 sed 's/.*| //' < inX YISO-8859-1 cannot be interpreted as UTF-8, decoding the input file fails. The strange match is probably due to the fact that sed tries to recover rather than fail completely.
The answer is based on Debian Lenny/Sid and sed 4.1.5.
sed is not very well setup for non-ASCII text. However you can use (almost) the same code in perl and get the result you want:
perl -pe 's/.*\| //' x