13 Oct
2019
13 Oct
'19
8:57 p.m.
Awk and csv isn't new. Googling 'awk csv' gets you a bunch of results.
There is also the 'csv' dynamically loadable extension for gawk to
be found in the gawkextlib project. Contact me off-list if you want
more details.
Thanks,
Arnold
Richard Tobin <richard(a)inf.ed.ac.uk> wrote:
I was reminded of this by Larry's comment:
I miss Brian on this list. I've interacted
with him over the years, the
one I remember the most was I was trying to do an awk like interface to a
key/value "database".
Recently I've had to deal with a lot of data in CSV
(comma-separated-value) format. Awk is *almost* prefect for this, but
of course doesn't handle the quoting of fields that contain commas.
One can usually work around it by finding a character that doesn't
occur in the data and converting the CSV file to use that as the
separator, but it's not ideal.
Awk's input could easily be modified to handle CSV files, but output
would be a bit more difficult, because you don't specify field
boundaries explicitly on output. One possibility would be a printf()
format specifier that takes a field and quotes it appropriately.
-- Richard
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