Pipe friendly command line tools for processing CSV files with headers.

Pipe friendly command line tools for processing CSV files with headers.

CSV files

• are well formatted according to rfc 4180
  • use , as field separator and " as quote character
  • all rows have the same number of fields
• have a header row
  • header names are unique

---

Installation

pip install csvtools

Except, this works only internally @CEU, not released to PyPI: the csvtools package there is not this one (see #6). This package will be rebranded to resolve this issue.

---

Tools

Structure manipulation

• add_id
• add_fields (TODO: implement)
• rmfields (TODO: rename to drop_fields?)
• select (TODO: rename to cut)
• extract_map
• unzip
• zip

Map-reduce helpers

• split
• concatenate

Conversion tools

• csv_to_tsv
• tsv_to_csv
• to_postgres
• to_sqlite (TODO: implement)
• from-sqlite (TODO: implement)

Temporal CSV tools (dealing with dates)

• normalize_date (TODO: implement)
• drop_bad_date (TODO: implement)
• snapshot
• snapshot_quality (TODO: implement)

---

The design goals of the tools are

• ease of use
  • minimal no-nonsense interface (file a bug if something is non-obvious!)
  • exclusive use of standard input/output wherever possible
  • composability with pipes
  • fields are referenced by name instead of index
• speed - simplicity results in speed, pipes enable use of multiple CPUs
• python 3 compatibility

Please note, that not all of the goals are achieved for all tools, yet.

---

Status

The tools are in production use.

This documentation is in need of some content and improvement.

The package will be rebranded as its name is taken on PyPI (#6).

Raise issues on github for questions, bugs, problems, or worthy alternatives not mentioned below.

You can also open pull requests.

---

Projects having similar goals

Python's csv module is exceptionally good, thus CSV processing is a low hanging fruit in Python.

A lot of random tools can be found, but there is only few well maintained projects.

Probably the best known and most mature is csvkit.

There is an overlap between the tools between csvtools and csvkit, in those cases csvtools should be recognizably faster (probably due to csvkit supporting csv variants or more functionality???).