stephan-rayner / csvmaster

It's like `cut`, except it plays nicely when your field separator appears inside your values. Can handle quoted, RFC 4180-compliant CSV files.

Introduction

csvmaster is a tool for working with CSV files on the command line. Why would you want that when you have cut and awk? Because cut and awk don't have any idea what to do with quoted fields. Because sed and awk can't distinguish between a field separator char that actually separates fields, and one that's inside a field's value. Because if you change the delimeter with those tools, they don't know how to quote fields containing the new delimiter.

csvmaster fixes all of that by using an actual CSV parsing engine for reading, writing, and field splitting.

Usage

To print out select fields: csvm --fields=0,1,2 test.csv

To print them out with a different separator: csvm --fields=0,1,2 --out='\t' test.csv

To use an input separator that is not a comma csvm --file=test.csv --in='\t' --out=','

Perhaps you want to actually use sed/awk to parse your data. This command will let you correctly separate your fields, then write out an unquoted CSV with a separator you can more safely parse with stardard command-line tools. cat test.csv | csvm --out='|' --no-rfc

Some lines may be commented out. You may ignore these lines: cat test.csv | csvm --out='|' --comment-char='#'

Short flags

csvm also accepts short flags:

• -f = filename
• -F = field numbers
• -i = input separator
• -o = output separator

Download

v1.1 for:

• Linux x86
• Linux x64
• Source tarball

Building

Install Go

go build -o csvm csvmaster.go