Subject: Re: bug#6277: cut

From: Pádraig Brady <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 27 May 2010 16:08:35 +0100

On 27/05/10 04:00, sandy bas wrote:
> Dear People:
> 
> Comma delimited files often have fields of the form "big,black,bear" where the
> commas within the quotes are not delimiters. A useful option in cut would
>  be to ignore the commas (delimiters) within the quotation marks.
> 
>   I would be glad to put it in if you would like the option.

Hmm, the CSV format is a bit more complicated than that
so as to support " and \n within fields also.
It would be more general I think to have a separate tool
to parse CSV to a format more easily usable on the shell,
and that it turn could be passed to cut -d, column -s, ...

Aha, the csvutils command from here seems to do this:
http://freshmeat.net/projects/csvutils

cheers,
Pádraig.