Linux – Convert Date in CSV File with Awk or csvcut

awkcsvlinuxtext processing

awk -F"," '{OFS=","; $1=system("date -d "$1" +%d-%m-%Y") ; print $0}' data.csv | head

I am trying to take the first column of a csv file and standardize the date format to %dd-%mm-%yyyy.

When I try the code above I get date: write error: Broken pipe.

But when I try the code below:

dd=$(csvcut -c  1 -e ISO-8859-1 -d ","  data.csv | head -2 | sed -n 2p)
echo $dd
echo $(date -d $dd "+%d-%m-%Y")

I get the the output:

2017-02-03

03-02-2017

What am I doing wrong. Any hints? Thanks.

My system: Ubuntu 16.04.1 LTS

EDIT 2: Here is a sample file: http://grn.dk/sites/default/files/attachments/data.csv

EDIT:

sure CSV data file (input): data.csv (with many rows)

Bogført,Tekst,Beløb,Saldo  

2017-02-03, random text,-425,-611524.54

output:

Bogført,Tekst,Beløb,Saldo    
03-02-2017, random text,-425,-611524.54

but the date format can be in any other format. I am currently looking into standardizing dates for an csv import job. Thanks.

Best Answer

You're using the system() function in the wrong way. Or rather, that's not what to use here as it doesn't return the output from the command, only the exit status (the output goes to the terminal).

Assuming date is GNU date, this is an awk script that will perform the date reformatting:

BEGIN { OFS = FS = "," }

$1 {
    cmd = sprintf("date -d '%s' '+%%d-%%m-%%Y' 2>/dev/null", $1);
    cmd | getline $1;
    print;
    close(cmd);
}

Running it:

$ awk -f script.awk data.csv
Bogført,Tekst,Beløb,Saldo
03-02-2017, random text,-425,-611524.54

The script will discard empty input lines. It creates a command string cmd that does the actual date conversion using GNU date. Errors from date will be thrown away (and $1 will remain unchanged).

To do it with cvssql (from csvkit):

$ sed '1,2d' data.csv | csvsql -H --query 'SELECT strftime("%d-%m-%Y", a), b, c, d FROM stdin' | sed '1d' >new_data.csv

The data in new_data.csv will be without the header row. To add it back:

$ cat <( head -n 1 data.csv ) new_data.csv >even_newer_data.csv
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