csvkit.md

csvkit

csvkit is a set of tools you can use in your command line to convert, interrogate and create CSV files (spreadsheets).

You can find the documentation online here but first you need to install it, using this line in Terminal:

pip install csvkit

One of the most powerful elements of csvkit is its ability to run SQL queries on CSV files using csvsql and sql2csv

You can also use its csvgrep command to filter large CSV files to create smaller more manageable ones

Here for example I've written a command which filters a file called 'allfiles.csv' to only show results where the first column contains the date 03-01 (March 1):

csvgrep -c 1 -r "[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]-03-01" allfiles.csv > march1.csv

• The -c 1 says look in column 1.
• The -r indicates that we are about to describe a pattern using regex
• "[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]-03-01" is the regex: it means any four digits (the year) followed by -03-01.
• Next comes the name of the file to be filtered
• Finally we put the results into a new file with > march1.csv