How to parse a CSV file in Bash?
LinuxBashCsvLinux Problem Overview
I'm working on a long Bash script. I want to read cells from a CSV file into Bash variables. I can parse lines and the first column, but not any other column. Here's my code so far:
cat myfile.csv|while read line
do
read -d, col1 col2 < <(echo $line)
echo "I got:$col1|$col2"
done
It's only printing the first column. As an additional test, I tried the following:
read -d, x y < <(echo a,b,)
And $y is empty. So I tried:
read x y < <(echo a b)
And $y is b. Why?
Linux Solutions
Solution 1 - Linux
You need to use IFS instead of -d:
while IFS=, read -r col1 col2
do
echo "I got:$col1|$col2"
done < myfile.csv
Note that for general purpose CSV parsing you should use a specialized tool which can handle quoted fields with internal commas, among other issues that Bash can't handle by itself. Examples of such tools are cvstool and csvkit.
Solution 2 - Linux
From the man page:
> -d delim > The first character of delim is used to terminate the input line, > rather than newline.
You are using -d, which will terminate the input line on the comma. It will not read the rest of the line. That's why $y is empty.
Solution 3 - Linux
> ## How to parse a CSV file in Bash?
Coming late to this question and as [tag:bash] do offer new features, because this question stand about [tag:bash] and because none of already posted answer show this powerful and compliant way of doing precisely this.
Parsing CSV files under bash, using loadable module
Conforming to RFC 4180, a string like this sample CSV row:
> 12,22.45,"Hello, ""man"".","A, b.",42
should be splitted as
1 12
2 22.45
3 Hello, "man".
4 A, b.
5 42
bash loadable .C compiled modules.
Under [tag:bash], you could create, edit, and use loadable [tag:c] compiled modules. Once loaded, they work like any other builtin!! ( You may find more information at source tree. ;)
Current source tree (Oct 15 2021, bash V5.1-rc3) do contain a bunch of samples:
accept listen for and accept a remote network connection on a given port
asort Sort arrays in-place
basename Return non-directory portion of pathname.
cat cat(1) replacement with no options - the way cat was intended.
csv process one line of csv data and populate an indexed array.
dirname Return directory portion of pathname.
fdflags Change the flag associated with one of bash's open file descriptors.
finfo Print file info.
head Copy first part of files.
hello Obligatory "Hello World" / sample loadable.
...
tee Duplicate standard input.
template Example template for loadable builtin.
truefalse True and false builtins.
tty Return terminal name.
uname Print system information.
unlink Remove a directory entry.
whoami Print out username of current user.
There is an full working cvs parser ready to use in examples/loadables directory: csv.c!!
Under Debian GNU/Linux based system, you may have to install bash-builtins package by
apt install bash-builtins
Using loadable bash-builtins:
Then:
enable -f /usr/lib/bash/csv csv
From there, you could use csv as a bash builtin.
With my sample: 12,22.45,"Hello, ""man"".","A, b.",42
csv -a myArray '12,22.45,"Hello, ""man"".","A, b.",42'
printf "%s\n" "${myArray[@]}" | cat -n
1 12
2 22.45
3 Hello, "man".
4 A, b.
5 42
Then in a loop, processing a file.
while IFS= read -r line;do
csv -a aVar "$line"
printf "First two columns are: [ '%s' - '%s' ]\n" "${aVar[0]}" "${aVar[1]}"
done <myfile.csv
This way is clearly the quickest and strongest than using any other combination of [tag:bash] builtins or fork to any binary.
Unfortunely, depending on your system implementation, if your version of [tag:bash] was compiled without loadable, this may not work...
Complete sample with multiline CSV fields.
Here is a small sample file with 1 headline, 4 columns and 3 rows. Because two fields do contain newline, the file are 6 lines length.
Id,Name,Desc,Value
1234,Cpt1023,"Energy counter",34213
2343,Sns2123,"Temperatur sensor
to trigg for alarm",48.4
42,Eye1412,"Solar sensor ""Day /
Night""",12199.21
And a small script able to parse this file correctly:
#!/bin/bash
enable -f /usr/lib/bash/csv csv
file="sample.csv"
exec {FD}<"$file"
read -ru $FD line
csv -a headline "$line"
printf -v fieldfmt '%-8s: "%%q"\\n' "${headline[@]}"
while read -ru $FD line;do
while csv -a row "$line" ; ((${#row[@]}<${#headline[@]})) ;do
read -ru $FD sline || break
line+=$'\n'"$sline"
done
printf "$fieldfmt\\n" "${row[@]}"
done
This may render: (I've used printf "%q" to represent non-printables characters like newlines as $'\n')
Id : "1234"
Name : "Cpt1023"
Desc : "Energy\ counter"
Value : "34213"
Id : "2343"
Name : "Sns2123"
Desc : "$'Temperatur sensor\nto trigg for alarm'"
Value : "48.4"
Id : "42"
Name : "Eye1412"
Desc : "$'Solar sensor "Day /\nNight"'"
Value : "12199.21"
You could find a full working sample there: csvsample.sh.txt or csvsample.sh.
Warning:
Of course, parsing CSV using this is not perfect! This work for many simple CSV files, but care about encoding and security!! For sample, this module won't be able to handle binary fields!
Read carefully csv.c source code comments and RFC 4180!
Solution 4 - Linux
We can parse csv files with quoted strings and delimited by say | with following code
while read -r line
do
field1=$(echo "$line" | awk -F'|' '{printf "%s", $1}' | tr -d '"')
field2=$(echo "$line" | awk -F'|' '{printf "%s", $2}' | tr -d '"')
echo "$field1 $field2"
done < "$csvFile"
awk parses the string fields to variables and tr removes the quote.
Slightly slower as awk is executed for each field.
Solution 5 - Linux
In addition to the answer from @Dennis Williamson, it may be helpful to skip the first line when it contains the header of the CSV:
{
read
while IFS=, read -r col1 col2
do
echo "I got:$col1|$col2"
done
} < myfile.csv
Solution 6 - Linux
If you want to read CSV file with some lines, so this the solution.
while IFS=, read -ra line
do
test $i -eq 1 && ((i=i+1)) && continue
for col_val in ${line[@]}
do
echo -n "$col_val|"
done
echo
done < "$csvFile"