may I jump in.

As already said by dail, a lexer, like UDL, can do this job.

High level description:
UDL needs the informations what should be coloured and which
font and size should be used. Once you’ve done this, your new
language appears in the language menu. To get your document colored,
as you’ve defined, you need to either manually click the new language
every time you want to or you register an file extension then your
UDL language gets automatically selected when such a file gets opened.

The description how the UDL works is here

Short description regarding your wishes:
In Language menu click on define your language…
A new window appears.
Click Create new and give your language a meaningful name.

Now you see, that a new field Ext. has been created. Here you would define
your preferred file extension.

The styler button needs to be used to define the color and font attributes for
that particular section.

In Keyword list you would enter the words that should be highlighted in different
color.

In Operator section you would defined the single chars like |.
Strictly spoken, you can define the | also as a keyword if you wish.

Cheers
Claudia