A command line utility to display csv file with its columns aligned.
csv files often have these readability problems:
- csv files are hard to read because the columns don't always align.
One way to solve such problem is to display the csv file with its columns aligned. csvalign is such utility.
Given the following csv file,
ID,FIRST_NAME,LAST_NAME,EMAIL,TEL
1001,John,Doe,[email protected],111-111-1111
1002,Jane,Smith,[email protected],222-222-2222
Running csvalign gives the following output:
$ csvalign users.csv
ID FIRST_NAME LAST_NAME EMAIL TEL
1001 John Doe [email protected] 111-111-1111
1002 Jane Smith [email protected] 222-222-2222By default, csvalign pads spacing between column with 2 spaces. To change the
padding, pass the -p option. For example, to space columns with a single space instead:
$ csvalign -p ' ' users.csv
ID FIRST_NAME LAST_NAME EMAIL TEL
1001 John Doe [email protected] 111-111-1111
1002 Jane Smith [email protected] 222-222-2222or to pad them with the vertical bar |:
$ csvalign -p '|' users.csv
ID |FIRST_NAME|LAST_NAME|EMAIL |TEL
1001|John |Doe |[email protected] |111-111-1111
1002|Jane |Smith |[email protected]|222-222-2222By default, csvalign guess the delimiter from the comma, tab, pipe, or the SOH
(ASCII 1) characters. To use another delimiter or to force a delimiter, use
the -d option.
For example, if the file users.rsv were using the carrot (^) as the
delimiter:
$ csvalign -d^ users.rsv
ID FIRST_NAME LAST_NAME EMAIL TEL
1001 John Doe [email protected] 111-111-1111
1002 Jane Smith [email protected] 222-222-2222It is also possible to tell csvalign to use an alternate set of characters from
which the guess a file's delimiter by setting the environment variable
CSV_DELIMS. For example, to tell csvalign to guess delimiters from a comma and
a carrot in BASH:
$ export CSV_DELIMS=,^
$ csvalign users.rsv
ID FIRST_NAME LAST_NAME EMAIL TEL
1001 John Doe [email protected] 111-111-1111
1002 Jane Smith [email protected] 222-222-2222NAME
csvalign - print csv rows with its columns aligned
SYNOPSIS
csvalign [-h] [-p PADDING] [-w WIDTHS] [-d DELIM] [FILE [FILE ...]]
DESCRIPTION
csvalign displays a comma-separated value (csv) file FILE with its columns aligned.
This purpose of this layout is to make it easier to associate each value with its col-
umn.
Options
-h, --help
Output a usage message and exit.
-p PADDING, --padding=PADDING
Use PADDING as the padding between the columns. The default is two spaces.
-w WIDTHS, --width=WIDTHS
By default, csvalign reads the entire csv file into memory to calculate the
width of each column before outputting the file. To avoid reading the contents
of the file into memory first, the widths of the columsn may be manually speci-
fied using this option.
WIDTHS is a comma-separated list of integers. A negative integer denotes the
width that is left aligned. A positive intger is the width that is right
aligned. The last integer in the list is the default width of columns after the
columns with the width specified.
Environment Variables
CSV_DELIMS
A set of characters used to guess the delimiter of a csv file. The guesswork
happens when reading the first line of the first FILE, by testing each character
present in CSV_DELIMS for the character with the most occurrence in the line.
If any of the characters occur the same number of times (including zero), the
earlier character in the variable is chosen. If the environment variable is not
set, it defaults to ',\t|\x0001'. CSV_DELIMS may include escape characters.
SEE ALSO
csvread(1), csvcut(1)