csvgrep - Man Page

• Find rows that have a certain string in column 1: csvgrep -c 1 -m string_to_match data.csv
• Find rows in which columns 3 or 4 match a certain regular expression: csvgrep -c 3,4 -r regular_expression data.csv
• Find rows in which the "name" column does NOT include the string "John Doe": csvgrep -i -c name -m "John Doe" data.csv

tldr.sh

Filter tabular data to only those rows where certain columns contain a given value or match a regular expression:

usage: csvgrep [-h] [-d DELIMITER] [-t] [-q QUOTECHAR] [-u {0,1,2,3}] [-b]
               [-p ESCAPECHAR] [-z FIELD_SIZE_LIMIT] [-e ENCODING] [-S] [-H]
               [-K SKIP_LINES] [-v] [-l] [--zero] [-V] [-n] [-c COLUMNS]
               [-m PATTERN] [-r REGEX] [-f MATCHFILE] [-i] [-a]
               [FILE]

Search CSV files. Like the Unix "grep" command, but for tabular data.

positional arguments:
  FILE                  The CSV file to operate on. If omitted, will accept
                        input as piped data via STDIN.

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -n, --names           Display column names and indices from the input CSV
                        and exit.
  -c COLUMNS, --columns COLUMNS
                        A comma-separated list of column indices, names or
                        ranges to be searched, e.g. "1,id,3-5".
  -m PATTERN, --match PATTERN
                        A string to search for.
  -r REGEX, --regex REGEX
                        A regular expression to match.
  -f MATCHFILE, --file MATCHFILE
                        A path to a file. For each row, if any line in the
                        file (stripped of line separators) is an exact match
                        of the cell value, the row matches.
  -i, --invert-match    Select non-matching rows, instead of matching rows.
  -a  --any-match       Select rows in which any column matches, instead of
                        all columns.

See also: Arguments common to all tools.

NOTE: Even though ‘-m’, ‘-r’, and ‘-f’ are listed as “optional” arguments, you must specify one of them.

Search for the row relating to Illinois:

csvgrep -c 1 -m ILLINOIS examples/realdata/FY09_EDU_Recipients_by_State.csv

Search for rows relating to states with names beginning with the letter “I”:

csvgrep -c 1 -r "^I" examples/realdata/FY09_EDU_Recipients_by_State.csv

Search for rows that do not contain an empty state cell:

csvgrep -c 1 -r "^$" -i examples/realdata/FY09_EDU_Recipients_by_State.csv

Perform a case-insensitive search:

csvgrep -c 1 -r "(?i)illinois" examples/realdata/FY09_EDU_Recipients_by_State.csv

Remove comment rows:

printf "a,b\n1,2\n# a comment\n3,4" | csvgrep --invert-match -c1 -r '^#'

Get the indices of the columns that contain matching text (\x1e is the Record Separator (RS) character):

csvgrep -m 22 -a -c 1- examples/realdata/FY09_EDU_Recipients_by_State.csv | csvformat -M $'\x1e' | xargs -d $'\x1e' -n1 sh -c 'echo $0 | csvcut -n' | grep 22

NOTE:

This last example is not performant.

Christopher Groskopf and contributors

2024, Christopher Groskopf and James McKinney