How to parse a CSV file in Bash

Question

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  lt   lt  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  lt   lt  echo a b    And  y is empty   So I tried   read x y  lt   lt  echo a b   And  y is b   Why

User · Accepted Answer

You need to use IFS instead of -d   while IFS   read -r col1 col2 do     echo  I got  col1  col2  done  lt  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

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

We can parse csv files with quoted strings and delimited by say   with following code while read -r line do     field1   echo  quot  line quot    awk -F      printf  quot  s quot    1     tr -d   quot        field2   echo  quot  line quot    awk -F      printf  quot  s quot    2     tr -d   quot         echo  quot  field1  field2 quot  done  lt   quot  csvFile quot   awk parses the string fields to variables and tr removes the quote  Slightly slower as awk is executed for each field

User · Answer

If you want to read CSV file with some lines  so this the solution   while IFS   read -ra line do      test  i -eq 1  amp  amp    i i 1    amp  amp  continue     for col val in   line         do         echo -n   col val                        done     echo         done  lt    csvFile

[linux] How to parse a CSV file in Bash?

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