How to parse csv file in bash

DennisWilliamson You should enclose the seperator e. In the case of a comma, it's not necessary and I tend to prefer to omit characters that are unnecessary. For example, you could always specify variables for expansion using curly braces e. To me, it looks cleaner. DennisWilliamson, From some time, bash source tree offer a loadable builtin csv parser!

Have a look at my answer! Of course there are some limitations Show 4 more comments. From the man page: -d delim The first character of delim is used to terminate the input line, rather than newline. Slightly slower as awk is executed for each field. Maithilish Maithilish 11 11 silver badges 19 19 bronze badges. Good, you can also use coma , — pkarc. Processing a line at a time with Awk is a gross antipattern. C compiled modules. Complete sample with multiline CSV fields. Warning: Of course, parsing CSV using this is not perfect!

Sean Bright k 17 17 gold badges silver badges bronze badges. Hauri F. Hauri Note that read will need a variable name for each field that you want to capture and the last one specified would simply be a catch-all of the remaining fields. If you look carefully at the output data, some of it returns incomplete values as some fields in the CSV file are text fields that contain the comma , separator and are enclosed in double quotes ".

You can figure out how many bad entries we have with another while loop, a simple regex, and a counter using Arithmetic Expansion. The example below uses the compound command to increment the count variable. So, unless you are sure to not have such text fields, I would not recommend using this first method. Awk is a domain-specific language designed for text processing. It is available on most Unix-like system, unfortunately, there may be a lot of variation between implementations and versions.

In our example, we will use the powerful GNU awk which is probably the most complete implementation of awk. If you require to support fields with line breaks, then see the next section about full CSV specification support. With the same countries. We will be careful to consider that fields are separated by commas , while ignoring the ones that are in fields surrounded by quotes ".

As suggested by Jonathan in a comment, there is a module for python that provides the command line tool csvfilter. It works like cut, but properly handles CSV column quoting:. I found csvkit to be useful, it is based on python csv module and has quite a lot of options for parsing complex csv files. Although it seems to be a bit slow. Try crush-tools , they are great at manipulating delimited data. It sounds like exactly what you're looking for.

My gut reaction would be to write a script wrapper around Python's csv module if there isn't already such a thing. I wrote one of these tools too UNIX only called csvprintf. It can also converts to XML in an online fashion. For a super lightweight wrapper around Python's csv module, you could look at pluckr. You will most likely need to write your own script for your specific needs, but this site has some dialogue about how to go about doing this.

You could then sort these results, find the unique ones, or use any other bash utility. There is a cool video here about working with CSV files from the command line. Only about a minute, I'd take a look. However, I guess you could group the cut utility with awk and not want to use it. I don't really know what exactly you mean by native bash command though, so I'll still suggest it.

This will only quote columns that need quoting, so if an input column has "Bar" with quotes it will come out Bar without quotes. It requires you to create a configuration file for most non-trivial tasks. The upside is that it's very flexible and can handle all sorts of structure, logic, and formatting that other tools can't. I like to use csvtool for quick jobs and use ffe for complex jobs or jobs that require frequent repeating. A quick google reveals an awk script that seems to handle csv files.

Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Also we are displaying one column value per line, per row.

If you want to print all columns of each row per line, replace do.. In this article, we have looked at how to parse csv file in shell script.

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