I have a text file: file.txt, with several thousand lines. It contains a lot of junk lines which I am not interested in, so I use the cut command to regex for the lines I am interested in first. For each entry I am interested in, it will be listed twice in the text file: Once in a "definition" section, another in a "value" section. I want to retrieve the first value from the "definition" section, and then for each entry found there find it's corresponding "value" section entry.
The first entry starts with ' gl_ ', while the 2nd entry would look like ' "gl_ ', starting with a '"'.
This is the code I have so far for looping through the text document, which then retrieves the values I am interested in and appends them to a .csv file:
while read -r line
do
if [[ $line == gl_* ]] ; then (param=$(cut -d'\' -f 1 $line) | def=$(cut -d'\' -f 2 $line) | type=$(cut -d'\' -f 4 $line) | prompt=$(cut -d'\' -f 8 $line))
while read -r glline
do
if [[ $glline == '"'$param* ]] ; then val=$(cut -d'\' -f 3 $glline) |
"$project";"$param";"$val";"$def";"$type";"$prompt" >> /filepath/file.csv
done < file.txt
done < file.txt
This seems to throw some syntax errors related to unexpected tokens near the first 'done' statement.
Example of text that needs to be parsed, and paired:
gl_one\User Defined\1\String\1\\1\Some Text
gl_two\User Defined\1\String\1\\1\Some Text also
gl_three\User Defined\1\Time\1\\1\Datetime now
some\junk
"gl_one\1\Value1
some\junk
"gl_two\1\Value2
"gl_three\1\Value3
So effectively, the while loop reads each line until it hits the first line that starts with 'gl_', which then stores that value (ie. gl_one) as a variable 'param'.
It then starts the nested while loop that looks for the line that starts with a ' " ' in front of the gl_, and is equivalent to the 'param' value. In other words, the
script should couple the lines gl_one and "gl_one, gl_two and "gl_two, gl_three and "gl_three.
The text file is large, and these are settings that have been defined this way. I need to collect the values for each gl_ parameter, to save them together in a .csv file with their corresponding "gl_ values.
Wanted regex output stored in variables would be something like this:
first while loop:
$param = gl_one, $def = User Defined, $type = String, $prompt = Some Text
second while loop:
$val = Value1
Then it stores these variables to the file.csv, with semi-colon separators.
Currently, I have an error for the first 'done' statement, which seems to indicate an issue with the quotation marks. Apart from this,
I am looking for general ideas and comments to the script. I.e, not entirely sure I am looking for the quotation mark parameters "gl_ correctly, or if the
semi-colons as .csv separators are added correctly.
Edit: Overall, the script runs now, but extremely slow due to the inner while loop. Is there any faster way to match the two lines together and add them to the .csv file?
Any ideas and comments?
This will generate a file containing the data you want:
cat file.txt | grep gl_ | sed -E "s/\"//" | sort | sed '$!N;s/\n/\\/' | awk -F'\' '{print $1"; "$5"; "$7"; "$NF}' > /filepath/file.csv
It uses grep to extract all lines containing 'gl_'
then sed to remove the leading '"' from the lines that contain one [I have assumed there are no further '"' in the line]
The lines are sorted
sed removes the return from each pair of lines
awk then prints
the required columns according to your requirements
Output routed to the file.
LANG=C sort -t\\ -sd -k1,1 <file.txt |\
sed '
/^gl_/{ # if definition
N; # append next line to buffer
s/\n"gl_[^\\]*//; # if value, strip first column
t; # and start next loop
}
D; # otherwise, delete the line
' |\
awk -F\\ -v p="$project" -v OFS=\; '{print p,$1,$10,$2,$4,$8 }' \
>>/filepath/file.csv
sort lines so gl_... appears immediately before "gl_... (LANG fixes LC_TYPE) - assumes definition appears before value
sed to help ensure matching definition and value (may still fail if duplicate/missing value), and tidy for awk
awk to pull out relevant fields
I have a .csv file that contains double quoted multi-line fields. I need to convert the multi-line cell to a single line. It doesn't show in the sample data but I do not know which fields might be multi-line so any solution will need to check every field. I do know how many columns I'll have. The first line will also need to be skipped. I don't how much data so performance isn't a consideration.
I need something that I can run from a bash script on Linux. Preferably using tools such as awk or sed and not actual programming languages.
The data will be processed further with Logstash but it doesn't handle double quoted multi-line fields hence the need to do some pre-processing.
I tried something like this and it kind of works on one row but fails on multiple rows.
sed -e :0 -e '/,.*,.*,.*,.*,/b' -e N -e '1n;N;N;N;s/\n/ /g' -e b0 file.csv
CSV example
First name,Last name,Address,ZIP
John,Doe,"Country
City
Street",12345
The output I want is
First name,Last name,Address,ZIP
John,Doe,Country City Street,12345
Jane,Doe,Country City Street,67890
etc.
etc.
First my apologies for getting here 7 months late...
I came across a problem similar to yours today, with multiple fields with multi-line types. I was glad to find your question but at least for my case I have the complexity that, as more than one field is conflicting, quotes might open, close and open again on the same line... anyway, reading a lot and combining answers from different posts I came up with something like this:
First I count the quotes in a line, to do that, I take out everything but quotes and then use wc:
quotes=`echo $line | tr -cd '"' | wc -c` # Counts the quotes
If you think of a single multi-line field, knowing if the quotes are 1 or 2 is enough. In a more generic scenario like mine I have to know if the number of quotes is odd or even to know if the line completes the record or expects more information.
To check for even or odd you can use the mod operand (%), in general:
even % 2 = 0
odd % 2 = 1
For the first line:
Odd means that the line expects more information on the next line.
Even means the line is complete.
For the subsequent lines, I have to know the status of the previous one. for instance in your sample text:
First name,Last name,Address,ZIP
John,Doe,"Country
City
Street",12345
You can say line 1 (John,Doe,"Country) has 1 quote (odd) what means the status of the record is incomplete or open.
When you go to line 2, there is no quote (even). Nevertheless this does not mean the record is complete, you have to consider the previous status... so for the lines following the first one it will be:
Odd means that record status toggles (incomplete to complete).
Even means that record status remains as the previous line.
What I did was looping line by line while carrying the status of the last line to the next one:
incomplete=0
cat file.csv | while read line; do
quotes=`echo $line | tr -cd '"' | wc -c` # Counts the quotes
incomplete=$((($quotes+$incomplete)%2)) # Check if Odd or Even to decide status
if [ $incomplete -eq 1 ]; then
echo -n "$line " >> new.csv # If line is incomplete join with next
else
echo "$line" >> new.csv # If line completes the record finish
fi
done
Once this was executed, a file in your format generates a new.csv like this:
First name,Last name,Address,ZIP
John,Doe,"Country City Street",12345
I like one-liners as much as everyone, I wrote that script just for the sake of clarity, you can - arguably - write it in one line like:
i=0;cat file.csv|while read l;do i=$((($(echo $l|tr -cd '"'|wc -c)+$i)%2));[[ $i = 1 ]] && echo -n "$l " || echo "$l";done >new.csv
I would appreciate it if you could go back to your example and see if this works for your case (which you most likely already solved). Hopefully this can still help someone else down the road...
Recovering the multi-line fields
Every need is different, in my case I wanted the records in one line to further process the csv to add some bash-extracted data, but I would like to keep the csv as it was. To accomplish that, instead of joining the lines with a space I used a code - likely unique - that I could then search and replace:
i=0;cat file.csv|while read l;do i=$((($(echo $l|tr -cd '"'|wc -c)+$i)%2));[[ $i = 1 ]] && echo -n "$l ~newline~ " || echo "$l";done >new.csv
the code is ~newline~, this is totally arbitrary of course.
Then, after doing my processing, I took the csv text file and replaced the coded newlines with real newlines:
sed -i 's/ ~newline~ /\n/g' new.csv
References:
Ternary operator: https://stackoverflow.com/a/3953666/6316852
Count char occurrences: https://stackoverflow.com/a/41119233/6316852
Other peculiar cases: https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/programming-9/complex-bash-string-substitution-of-csv-file-with-multiline-data-937179/
TL;DR
Run this:
i=0;cat file.csv|while read l;do i=$((($(echo $l|tr -cd '"'|wc -c)+$i)%2));[[ $i = 1 ]] && echo -n "$l " || echo "$l";done >new.csv
... and collect results in new.csv
I hope it helps!
If Perl is your option, please try the following:
perl -e '
while (<>) {
$str .= $_;
}
while ($str =~ /("(("")|[^"])*")|((^|(?<=,))[^,]*((?=,)|$))/g) {
if (($el = $&) =~ /^".*"$/s) {
$el =~ s/^"//s; $el =~ s/"$//s;
$el =~ s/""/"/g;
$el =~ s/\s+(?!$)/ /g;
}
push(#ary, $el);
}
foreach (#ary) {
print /\n$/ ? "$_" : "$_,";
}' sample.csv
sample.csv:
First name,Last name,Address,ZIP
John,Doe,"Country
City
Street",12345
John,Doe,"Country
City
Street",67890
Result:
First name,Last name,Address,ZIP
John,Doe,Country City Street,12345
John,Doe,Country City Street,67890
This might work for you (GNU sed):
sed ':a;s/[^,]\+/&/4;tb;N;ba;:b;s/\n\+/ /g;s/"//g' file
Test each line to see that it contains the correct number of fields (in the example that was 4). If there are not enough fields, append the next line and repeat the test. Otherwise, replace the newline(s) by spaces and finally remove the "'s.
N.B. This may be fraught with problems such as ,'s between "'s and quoted "'s.
Try cat -v file.csv. When the file was made with Excel, you might have some luck: When the newlines in a field are a simple \n and the newline at the end is a \r\n (which will look like ^M), parsing is simple.
# delete all newlines and replace the ^M with a new newline.
tr -d "\n" < file.csv| tr "\r" "\n"
# Above two steps with one command
tr "\n\r" " \n" < file.csv
When you want a space between the joined line, you need an additional step.
tr "\n\r" " \n" < file.csv | sed '2,$ s/^ //'
EDIT: #sjaak commented this didn't work is his case.
When your broken lines also have ^M you still can be a lucky (wo-)man.
When your broken field is always the first field in double quotes and you have GNU sed 4.2.2, you can join 2 lines when the first line has exactly one double quote.
sed -rz ':a;s/(\n|^)([^"]*)"([^"]*)\n/\1\2"\3 /;ta' file.csv
Explanation:
-z don't use \n as line endings
:a label for repeating the step after successful replacement
(\n|^) Search after a newline or the very first line
([^"]*) Substring without a "
ta Go back to label a and repeat
awk pattern matching is working.
answer in one line :
awk '/,"/{ORS=" "};/",/{ORS="\n"}{print $0}' YourFile
if you'd like to drop quotes, you could use:
awk '/,"/{ORS=" "};/",/{ORS="\n"}{print $0}' YourFile | sed 's/"//gw NewFile'
but I prefer to keep it.
to explain the code:
/Pattern/ : find pattern in current line.
ORS : indicates the output line record.
$0 : indicates the whole of the current line.
's/OldPattern/NewPattern/': substitude first OldPattern with NewPattern
/g : does the previous action for all OldPattern
/w : write the result to Newfile
Im new to bash and trying to extract a list of patterns from file:
File1.txt
ABC
BDF
GHJ
base.csv (tried comma separated and tab delimited)
line 1,,,,"hfhf,ferf,ju,ABC"
line 2 ,,,,,"ewy,trggt,gtg,ABC,RFR"
line 3 .."himk,n,hn.ujj., BDF"
etc
Suggested output is smth like
ABC
line 1..
line 2..(whole lines)
BDF
line 3..
and so on for each pattern from file 1
the code i tried was:
#!/bin/bash
for i in *.txt -# cycle through all files containing pattern lists
do
for q in "$i"; # # cycle through list
do
echo $q >>output.${i};
grep -f "${q}" base.csv >>output.${i};
echo "\n";
done
done
But output is only filename and then some list of strings without pattern names, e.g.
File1.txt
line 1...
line 2...
line 3..
so i don`t know to what pattern belongs each string and have to check and assign manually. Can you please point out my errors? Thanks!
grep can process multiple files in one go, and then has the attractive added bonus of indicating which file it found a match in.
grep -f File1.txt base.csv >output.txt
It's not clear what you hope for the inner loop to do; it will just loop over a single token at a time, so it's not really a loop at all.
If you want the output to be grouped per pattern, here's a for loop which looks for one pattern at a time:
while read -r pat; do
echo "$pat"
grep "$pat" *.txt
done <File1.txt >output.txt
But the most efficient way to tackle this is to write a simple Awk script which processes all the input files at once, and groups the matches before printing them.
An additional concern is anchoring. grep "ABC" will find a match in 123DEABCXYZ; is this something you want to avoid? You can improve the regex, or, again, turn to Awk which gives you more control over where exactly to look for a match in a structured line.
awk '# Read patterns into memory
NR==FNR { a[++i] = $1; next }
# Loop across patterns
{ for(j=1; j<=i; ++j)
if($0 ~ a[j]) {
print FILENAME ":" FNR ":" $0 >>output.a[j]
next }
}' File1.txt base.csv
You're not actually reading the files, you're just handling the filenames. Try this:
#!/bin/bash
for i in *.txt # cycle through all files containing pattern lists
do
while read -r q # read file line by line
do
echo "$q" >>"output.${i}"
grep -f "${q}" base.csv >>"output.${i}"
echo "\n"
done < "${i}"
done
Here is one that separates (with split, comma-separatd with quotes and spaces stripped off) words from file2 to an array (word[]) and stores the record names (line 1 etc.) to it comma-separated:
awk '
NR==FNR {
n=split($0,tmp,/[" ]*(,|$)[" ]*/) # split words
for(i=2;i<=n;i++) # after first
if(tmp[i]!="") # non-empties
word[tmp[i]]=word[tmp[i]] (word[tmp[i]]==""?"":",") tmp[1] # hash rownames
record[tmp[1]]=$0 # store records
next
}
($1 in word) { # word found
n=split(word[$1],tmp,",") # get record names
print $1 ":" # output word
for(i=1;i<=n;i++) # and records
print record[tmp[i]]
}' file2 file1
Output:
ABC:
line 1,,,,"hfhf,ferf,ju,ABC"
line 2 ,,,,,"ewy,trggt,gtg,ABC,RFR"
BDF:
line 3 .."himk,n,hn.ujj., BDF"
Thank you for your kind help, my friends.
Tried both variants above but kept getting various errors ( "do" expected) or misbehavior ( gets names of pattern blocks, eg ABC, BDF, but no lines.
Gave up for a while and then eventually tried another way
While base goal were to cycle through pattern list files, search for patterns in huge file and write out specific columns from lines found - i simply wrote
for *i in *txt # cycle throughfiles w/ patterns
do
grep -F -f "$i" bigfile.csv >> ${i}.out1 #greps all patterns from current file
cut -f 2,3,4,7 ${i}.out1>> ${i}.out2 # cuts columns of interest and writes them out to another file
done
I'm aware that this code should be improved using some fancy pipeline features, but it works perfectly as is, hope it`ll help somebody in similar situation. You can easily add some echoes to write out pattern list names as i initially requested
If I have a csv file, is there a quick bash way to print out the contents of only any single column? It is safe to assume that each row has the same number of columns, but each column's content would have different length.
You could use awk for this. Change '$2' to the nth column you want.
awk -F "\"*,\"*" '{print $2}' textfile.csv
yes. cat mycsv.csv | cut -d ',' -f3 will print 3rd column.
The simplest way I was able to get this done was to just use csvtool. I had other use cases as well to use csvtool and it can handle the quotes or delimiters appropriately if they appear within the column data itself.
csvtool format '%(2)\n' input.csv
Replacing 2 with the column number will effectively extract the column data you are looking for.
Landed here looking to extract from a tab separated file. Thought I would add.
cat textfile.tsv | cut -f2 -s
Where -f2 extracts the 2, non-zero indexed column, or the second column.
Here is a csv file example with 2 columns
myTooth.csv
Date,Tooth
2017-01-25,wisdom
2017-02-19,canine
2017-02-24,canine
2017-02-28,wisdom
To get the first column, use:
cut -d, -f1 myTooth.csv
f stands for Field and d stands for delimiter
Running the above command will produce the following output.
Output
Date
2017-01-25
2017-02-19
2017-02-24
2017-02-28
To get the 2nd column only:
cut -d, -f2 myTooth.csv
And here is the output
Output
Tooth
wisdom
canine
canine
wisdom
incisor
Another use case:
Your csv input file contains 10 columns and you want columns 2 through 5 and columns 8, using comma as the separator".
cut uses -f (meaning "fields") to specify columns and -d (meaning "delimiter") to specify the separator. You need to specify the latter because some files may use spaces, tabs, or colons to separate columns.
cut -f 2-5,8 -d , myvalues.csv
cut is a command utility and here is some more examples:
SYNOPSIS
cut -b list [-n] [file ...]
cut -c list [file ...]
cut -f list [-d delim] [-s] [file ...]
I think the easiest is using csvkit:
Gets the 2nd column:
csvcut -c 2 file.csv
However, there's also csvtool, and probably a number of other csv bash tools out there:
sudo apt-get install csvtool (for Debian-based systems)
This would return a column with the first row having 'ID' in it.
csvtool namedcol ID csv_file.csv
This would return the fourth row:
csvtool col 4 csv_file.csv
If you want to drop the header row:
csvtool col 4 csv_file.csv | sed '1d'
First we'll create a basic CSV
[dumb#one pts]$ cat > file
a,b,c,d,e,f,g,h,i,k
1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10
a,b,c,d,e,f,g,h,i,k
1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10
Then we get the 1st column
[dumb#one pts]$ awk -F , '{print $1}' file
a
1
a
1
Many answers for this questions are great and some have even looked into the corner cases.
I would like to add a simple answer that can be of daily use... where you mostly get into those corner cases (like having escaped commas or commas in quotes etc.,).
FS (Field Separator) is the variable whose value is dafaulted to
space. So awk by default splits at space for any line.
So using BEGIN (Execute before taking input) we can set this field to anything we want...
awk 'BEGIN {FS = ","}; {print $3}'
The above code will print the 3rd column in a csv file.
The other answers work well, but since you asked for a solution using just the bash shell, you can do this:
AirBoxOmega:~ d$ cat > file #First we'll create a basic CSV
a,b,c,d,e,f,g,h,i,k
1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10
a,b,c,d,e,f,g,h,i,k
1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10
a,b,c,d,e,f,g,h,i,k
1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10
a,b,c,d,e,f,g,h,i,k
1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10
a,b,c,d,e,f,g,h,i,k
1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10
a,b,c,d,e,f,g,h,i,k
1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10
And then you can pull out columns (the first in this example) like so:
AirBoxOmega:~ d$ while IFS=, read -a csv_line;do echo "${csv_line[0]}";done < file
a
1
a
1
a
1
a
1
a
1
a
1
So there's a couple of things going on here:
while IFS=, - this is saying to use a comma as the IFS (Internal Field Separator), which is what the shell uses to know what separates fields (blocks of text). So saying IFS=, is like saying "a,b" is the same as "a b" would be if the IFS=" " (which is what it is by default.)
read -a csv_line; - this is saying read in each line, one at a time and create an array where each element is called "csv_line" and send that to the "do" section of our while loop
do echo "${csv_line[0]}";done < file - now we're in the "do" phase, and we're saying echo the 0th element of the array "csv_line". This action is repeated on every line of the file. The < file part is just telling the while loop where to read from. NOTE: remember, in bash, arrays are 0 indexed, so the first column is the 0th element.
So there you have it, pulling out a column from a CSV in the shell. The other solutions are probably more practical, but this one is pure bash.
You could use GNU Awk, see this article of the user guide.
As an improvement to the solution presented in the article (in June 2015), the following gawk command allows double quotes inside double quoted fields; a double quote is marked by two consecutive double quotes ("") there. Furthermore, this allows empty fields, but even this can not handle multiline fields. The following example prints the 3rd column (via c=3) of textfile.csv:
#!/bin/bash
gawk -- '
BEGIN{
FPAT="([^,\"]*)|(\"((\"\")*[^\"]*)*\")"
}
{
if (substr($c, 1, 1) == "\"") {
$c = substr($c, 2, length($c) - 2) # Get the text within the two quotes
gsub("\"\"", "\"", $c) # Normalize double quotes
}
print $c
}
' c=3 < <(dos2unix <textfile.csv)
Note the use of dos2unix to convert possible DOS style line breaks (CRLF i.e. "\r\n") and UTF-16 encoding (with byte order mark) to "\n" and UTF-8 (without byte order mark), respectively. Standard CSV files use CRLF as line break, see Wikipedia.
If the input may contain multiline fields, you can use the following script. Note the use of special string for separating records in output (since the default separator newline could occur within a record). Again, the following example prints the 3rd column (via c=3) of textfile.csv:
#!/bin/bash
gawk -- '
BEGIN{
RS="\0" # Read the whole input file as one record;
# assume there is no null character in input.
FS="" # Suppose this setting eases internal splitting work.
ORS="\n####\n" # Use a special output separator to show borders of a record.
}
{
nof=patsplit($0, a, /([^,"\n]*)|("(("")*[^"]*)*")/, seps)
field=0;
for (i=1; i<=nof; i++){
field++
if (field==c) {
if (substr(a[i], 1, 1) == "\"") {
a[i] = substr(a[i], 2, length(a[i]) - 2) # Get the text within
# the two quotes.
gsub(/""/, "\"", a[i]) # Normalize double quotes.
}
print a[i]
}
if (seps[i]!=",") field=0
}
}
' c=3 < <(dos2unix <textfile.csv)
There is another approach to the problem. csvquote can output contents of a CSV file modified so that special characters within field are transformed so that usual Unix text processing tools can be used to select certain column. For example the following code outputs the third column:
csvquote textfile.csv | cut -d ',' -f 3 | csvquote -u
csvquote can be used to process arbitrary large files.
I needed proper CSV parsing, not cut / awk and prayer. I'm trying this on a mac without csvtool, but macs do come with ruby, so you can do:
echo "require 'csv'; CSV.read('new.csv').each {|data| puts data[34]}" | ruby
I wonder why none of the answers so far have mentioned csvkit.
csvkit is a suite of command-line tools for converting to and working
with CSV
csvkit documentation
I use it exclusively for csv data management and so far I have not found a problem that I could not solve using cvskit.
To extract one or more columns from a cvs file you can use the csvcut utility that is part of the toolbox. To extract the second column use this command:
csvcut -c 2 filename_in.csv > filename_out.csv
csvcut reference page
If the strings in the csv are quoted, add the quote character with the q option:
csvcut -q '"' -c 2 filename_in.csv > filename_out.csv
Install with pip install csvkit or sudo apt install csvkit.
Simple solution using awk. Instead of "colNum" put the number of column you need to print.
cat fileName.csv | awk -F ";" '{ print $colNum }'
csvtool col 2 file.csv
where 2 is the column you are interested in
you can also do
csvtool col 1,2 file.csv
to do multiple columns
You can't do it without a full CSV parser.
If you know your data will not be quoted, then any solution that splits on , will work well (I tend to reach for cut -d, -f1 | sed 1d), as will any of the CSV manipulation tools.
If you want to produce another CSV file, then xsv, csvkit, csvtool, or other CSV manipulation tools are appropriate.
If you want to extract the contents of one single column of a CSV file, unquoting them so that they can be processed by subsequent commands, this Python 1-liner does the trick for CSV files with headers:
python -c 'import csv,sys'$'\n''for row in csv.DictReader(sys.stdin): print(row["message"])'
The "message" inside of the print function selects the column.
If the CSV file doesn't have headers:
python -c 'import csv,sys'$'\n''for row in csv.reader(sys.stdin): print(row[1])'
Python's CSV library supports all kinds of CSV dialects, so if your CSV file uses different conventions, it's possible to support them with relatively little change to the code.
Been using this code for a while, it is not "quick" unless you count "cutting and pasting from stackoverflow".
It uses ${##} and ${%%} operators in a loop instead of IFS. It calls 'err' and 'die', and supports only comma, dash, and pipe as SEP chars (that's all I needed).
err() { echo "${0##*/}: Error:" "$#" >&2; }
die() { err "$#"; exit 1; }
# Return Nth field in a csv string, fields numbered starting with 1
csv_fldN() { fldN , "$1" "$2"; }
# Return Nth field in string of fields separated
# by SEP, fields numbered starting with 1
fldN() {
local me="fldN: "
local sep="$1"
local fldnum="$2"
local vals="$3"
case "$sep" in
-|,|\|) ;;
*) die "$me: arg1 sep: unsupported separator '$sep'" ;;
esac
case "$fldnum" in
[0-9]*) [ "$fldnum" -gt 0 ] || { err "$me: arg2 fldnum=$fldnum must be number greater or equal to 0."; return 1; } ;;
*) { err "$me: arg2 fldnum=$fldnum must be number"; return 1;} ;;
esac
[ -z "$vals" ] && err "$me: missing arg2 vals: list of '$sep' separated values" && return 1
fldnum=$(($fldnum - 1))
while [ $fldnum -gt 0 ] ; do
vals="${vals#*$sep}"
fldnum=$(($fldnum - 1))
done
echo ${vals%%$sep*}
}
Example:
$ CSVLINE="example,fields with whitespace,field3"
$ $ for fno in $(seq 3); do echo field$fno: $(csv_fldN $fno "$CSVLINE"); done
field1: example
field2: fields with whitespace
field3: field3
You can also use while loop
IFS=,
while read name val; do
echo "............................"
echo Name: "$name"
done<itemlst.csv