Command line friendly spreadsheets

command linecsvtext processing

Does such a thing exist? Text-based spreadsheets that display well in a CLI environment. I'm aware that I could cat foobar.csvand do as I please, but it isn't particularly practical or attractive. I cannot imagine it would be hard to format a table, and maybe follow certain rules (math?) as well.

Emacs has org-mode which handles text-based tables quite well, and allows exporting to multiple formats. However, one must use Emacs! Which as a Vim user I would prefer to avoid.

Best Answer

There's sc and oleo (neither of which I have any experience with). Being a GNU project, however, oleo's handling is more likely to be emacsesque than vimmy.

Related Solutions

Command-line-friendly full-text indexing

Have you looked at Lucene or Sphinx? While you will need to initially parse the documents you want to index, once that's done, either one can search from the cli.

For Lucene, there is some info on doing this available.

Sphinx, is a bit more vague, but there is also some documentation available. You can pass structured XML data of your choice to sphinx via the xmlpipe2 data source.

Lucene relies on Java, while Sphinx is built in C++ with no needed outside dependencies.

Either one is going to require a bit of work to do what you want, but, seems like a totally workable solution.

Command-Line – Robust Tools for Processing CSV Files

You can use Python's csv module.

A simple example:

import csv
reader = csv.reader(open("test.csv", "r"))
for row in reader:
    for col in row:
        print col

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Command-line-friendly full-text indexing

Command-Line – Robust Tools for Processing CSV Files

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