Command line CSV viewer? [closed]

Question

Anyone know of a command-line CSV viewer for Linux/OS X? I'm thinking of something like less but that spaces out the columns in a more readable way. (I'd be fine with opening it with OpenOffice Calc or Excel, but that's way too overpowered for just looking at the data like I need to.) Having horizontal and vertical scrolling would be great.

Answer 1

There's this short command line script in python: https://github.com/rgrp/csv2ascii/blob/master/csv2ascii.py

Just download and place in your path. Usage is like

csv2ascii.py [options] csv-file-path

Convert csv file at csv-file-path to ascii form returning the result on stdout. If csv-file-path = '-' then read from stdin.

Options:

  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -w WIDTH, --width=WIDTH
                        Width of ascii output
  -c COLUMNS, --columns=COLUMNS
                        Only display this number of columns

Answer 2

The nodejs package tecfu/tty-table can be globally installed to do precisely this:

apt-get install nodejs
npm i -g tty-table
cat data.csv | tty-table

It can also handle streams.

For more info, see the docs for terminal usage here.

Answer 3

Yet another multi-functional CSV (and not only) manipulation tool: Miller. From its own description, it is like awk, sed, cut, join, and sort for name-indexed data such as CSV, TSV, and tabular JSON. (link to github repository: https://github.com/johnkerl/miller)

Answer 4

If you're a vimmer, use the CSV plugin, which is juuust beautiful.

Answer 5

You can install csvtool (on Ubuntu) via

sudo apt-get install csvtool

and then run:

csvtool readable filename | view -

This will make it nice and pretty inside of a read-only vim instance, even if you have some cells with very long values.

Answer 6

I wrote this csv_view.sh to format CSVs from the command line, this reads the entire file to figure out the optimal width of each column (requires perl, assumes there are no commas in fields, also uses less):

#!/bin/bash

perl -we '
  sub max( @ ) {
    my $max = shift;

    map { $max = $_ if $_ > $max } @_;
    return $max;
  }

  sub transpose( @ ) {
    my @matrix = @_;
    my $width  = scalar @{ $matrix[ 0 ] };
    my $height = scalar @matrix;

    return map { my $x = $_; [ map { $matrix[ $_ ][ $x ] } 0 .. $height - 1 ] } 0 .. $width - 1;
  }

  # Read all lines, as arrays of fields
  my @lines = map { s/\r?\n$//; [ split /,/ ] } ;

  my $widths =
    # Build a pack expression based on column lengths
    join "",

    # For each column get the longest length plus 1
    map { 'A' . ( 1 + max map { length } @$_ ) }

    # Get arrays of columns
    transpose

    @lines
  ;

  # Format all lines with pack
  map { print pack( $widths, @$_ ) . "\n" } @lines;
' $1 | less -NS