Command-Line – Robust Tools for Processing CSV Files

command linecsvsoftware-rectext processing

I work with CSV files and sometimes need to quickly check the contents of a row or column from the command line. In many cases cut, head, tail, and friends will do the job; however, cut cannot easily deal with situations such as

"this, is the first entry", this is the second, 34.5

Here, the first comma is part of the first field, but cut -d, -f1 disagrees. Before I write a solution myself, I was wondering if anyone knew of a good tool that already exists for this job. It would have to, at the very least, be able to handle the example above and return a column from a CSV formatted file. Other desirable features include the ability to select columns based on the column names given in the first row, support for other quoting styles and support for tab-separated files.

If you don't know of such a tool but have suggestions regarding implementing such a program in Bash, Perl, or Python, or other common scripting languages, I wouldn't mind such suggestions.

Best Answer

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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