Can you specify an enclosure for cut?

Question

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Is there a robust command line tool for processing csv files?

I can use cut to extract columns from a file:

$ cat foo
foo,bar,hello
bash,baz,world

$ cut -d\, -f2 foo
bar
baz

But what if a column has a delimiter in it that is safe inside an enclosure like this?

$ cat foo
foo,"hello, world",bar
bash,goodbye,baz

$ cut -d\, -f2 temp12
"hello
goodbye

Is there some way to tell cut to respect the enclosure of quote "" characters?

Strictly speaking, the answer is: no, you need a proper CSV parser. — Gilles 'SO- stop being evil', Nov 27 '12 at 00:13
You could quickly code up csv output script using some python or perl. — sparticvs, Nov 27 '12 at 03:06

score 3 · Answer 1 · answered Nov 27 '12 at 14:36

3

Definitely not for GNU cut, at least:

/* The delimeter character for field mode. */ static unsigned char delim;

(as seen in GNU coreutils source)

answered Nov 27 '12 at 14:36

Leonid

963

Stéphane Chazelas · Accepted Answer · 2012-11-27T15:59:15.003

cut could do it if you first preprocess its input to escape the characters inside the quotes (for instance, replace "_" with "_u" and "," with "_c" inside quotes, or replace every character with their 2-byte hex notation) and postprocess it to restore that escaping.

Something like:

perl -pe 's/"(.*?)"/"\"".unpack("H*", $1)."\""/ge' |
  cut -d, -f2 |
  perl -pe 's/"(.*?)"/"\"".pack("H*",$1)."\""/ge'

(assuming there's no escaped quotes inside (or outside) the quotes).

But, given the effort it would require, you might as well use a proper csv parser or do it whole with a perl-like regular expression engine.

I don't think this is the solution he should be looking for. — Bernhard, Nov 27 '12 at 15:50

Can you specify an enclosure for cut?

2 Answers2