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NAME

csvgrep - search for patterns in a CSV and display results in a table

SYNOPSIS

 csvgrep <pattern> <file>
 csvgrep -d <directory> <pattern>

DESCRIPTION

csvgrep is a script that lets you look for a pattern in a CSV file, and then displays the results in a text table. We assume that the first line in the CSV is a header row.

The simplest usage is to look for a word in a CSV:

 % csvgrep Murakami books.csv
 +-------------------+-----------------+-------+------+
 | Book              | Author          | Pages | Date |
 +-------------------+-----------------+-------+------+
 | Norwegian Wood    | Haruki Murakami | 400   | 1987 |
 | Men without Women | Haruki Murakami | 228   | 2017 |
 +-------------------+-----------------+-------+------+

As with regular grep, you can use the -i switch to make it case-insensitive:

 % csvgrep -i wood books.csv
 +---------------------+-----------------+-------+------+
 | Book                | Author          | Pages | Date |
 +---------------------+-----------------+-------+------+
 | Norwegian Wood      | Haruki Murakami | 400   | 1987 |
 | A Walk in the Woods | Bill Bryson     | 276   | 1997 |
 +---------------------+-----------------+-------+------+

You can specify a subset of the columns to display with the -c option, which takes a comma-separated list of column numbers:

 % csvgrep -c 0,1,3 -i mary books.csv
 +--------------+--------------+------+
 | Book         | Author       | Date |
 +--------------+--------------+------+
 | Mary Poppins | PL Travers   | 1934 |
 | Frankenstein | Mary Shelley | 1818 |
 +--------------+--------------+------+

The pattern can be a Perl regexp, but you'll probably need to quote it from your shell:

 % csvgrep -i 'walk.*wood' books.csv
 +-----------------------+-------------+-------+------+
 | Book                  | Author      | Pages | Date |
 +-----------------------+-------------+-------+------+
 | A Walk in the Woods   | Bill Bryson | 276   | 1997 |
 | Death Walks the Woods | Cyril Hare  | 222   | 1954 |
 +-----------------------+-------------+-------+------+

At work we have a number of situations where we have a directory that contains multiple versions of a particular CSV file, for example with a feed from a customer. With the -d option, csvgrep will look at the most recent file in the specified directory, only considering files with a .csv extension:

 % csvgrep -d /usr/local/feeds/users -i smith

This is a script I've used internally, with features being added as I wanted them. Let me know if you've ideas for additional features, or send me a pull request.

REPOSITORY

https://github.com/neilb/csvgrep

AUTHOR

Neil Bowers <neilb@cpan.org>

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

This software is copyright (c) 2017 by Neil Bowers <neilb@cpan.org>.

This is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as the Perl 5 programming language system itself.