bash Cookbook

Parsing a CSV Data File

Problem

You have a Comma Separated Values (CSV) data file that you need to parse.

Solution

Unlike the previous recipe for converting to CSV, there is no easy way to do this, since it’s tricky to define exactly what CSV really means.

Possible solutions for you to explore are:

• sed: http://sed.sourceforge.net/sedfaq4.html#s4.12

• awk: http://lorance.freeshell.org/csv/

• Perl: Mastering Regular Expressions by Jeffrey E. F. Friedl (O’Reilly) has a regex to do this

• Perl: See the CPAN (http://www.cpan.org/) for various modules

• Load the CSV file into a spreadsheet (OpenOffice.org’s Calc and Microsoft’s Excel both work), then copy and paste into a text editor and you should get tab delimited output that you can now use easily

Discussion

As noted in Converting a Data File to CSV, there is no formal specification for CSV, and that fact, combined with data variations, makes this task much harder than it sounds.

See Also

• Converting a Data File to CSV