some csv tools

csv-tools.md

CSV tools - a partial list

I tend to wrangle a lot of spreadsheet data but don't always want to use use google sheets and habitually convert to csv and process them locally.

This is a list of some of my favourite tools, its non exhaustive and biased towards my preference for terminal based user interfaces

1. visidata - the swiss army tool for tabular data

https://www.visidata.org/

if you install one tool this is the one

• handles many formats, json, yaml, xlsx, parquet, sqlite, postgresql, zip
• pythonic
• extensible
• fast
• reliable
• handle multitab excel files
• can open a zipfile containing json, csv, json, yaml ...

assumes you have python3, has a bit of a learning curve because of all the key mappings but there is a menu system.

pip3 install visidata
vd foo.bar

2. csvkit - command line unix style csv tools

https://csvkit.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

command line tools for unix style wrangling with csvgrep, csvcut, csvsort, csvlook, csvjoin

• convert json, xlsx to csv
• filter, join, format, stack files

assumes python 3

pip3 install csvkit

3. xsv - rust command line tool for csv wrangling

https://github.com/BurntSushi/xsv

xsv is a command line program for indexing, slicing, analyzing, splitting and joining CSV files

if your data is too big for csvkit try this

brew install xsv

4. steampipe - wrangle cloud apis and local data with sql

https://steampipe.io

• turns a wealth of cloud apis into postgres SQL
• dozens of plugins
• makes csv available to postgres
• supports third party tools like pgadmin, psql

Uses a pluggable Postgres foreign data wrapper to process data csv, json, yaml but also AWS, Azure, prometheus etc

brew install steampipe
steampipe plugin install csv
steampipe query