top button
Flag Notify
    Connect to us
      Site Registration

Site Registration

Problems sorting a CSV file with sort in Linux [CLOSED]

0 votes
638 views

The problem is that some of the fields contain commas, but they are inside double quotes.

Example:

sort -t, -k1,1 -k3,3 -k2,2 SomeFile.csv > OutputFile.csv

A line could look something like this:
This is the first field,"This is, well, the second field",The third field could look like this

That line has three fields:
1: This is the first field
2: "This is, well, the second field"
3: The third field could look like this

But sort consider it to have five fields:
1: This is the first field
2: "This is
3: well
4: the second field
5: The third field could look like this

How would you solve this?

closed with the note: None
posted Aug 8, 2013 by Jagan Mishra

Share this question
Facebook Share Button Twitter Share Button LinkedIn Share Button

1 Answer

+1 vote
 
Best answer

Try csvtool. You could use it to replace the , field separators with TABs, say, pipe through sort specifying TAB as the field delimiter and then pipe through csvtool again to convert the fileds separators back to commas. E.g.:

csvtool -t ',' -u TAB cat input.csv | sort -f 2 -t ' ' | csvtool -t TAB -u ',' cat - > output.csv
answer Aug 8, 2013 by Naveena Garg
Similar Questions
+1 vote
Best Secure practice for uploading a csv file to import using PHP

I just wanted to see the best way to securely accomplish this task. When we want to update a DB we upload to a writable directory instead of writing it directly to MySQL, I don't like having writable directories if possible.
Is there a right or better way to accomplish this?

+2 votes
How to read CSV file in python?

Is there a better way to do that:

def Read_CSV_File(filename):
 file = open(filename, "r")
 reader = csv.DictReader(file)
 line = 1
 for row in reader:
 if line < 6:
 reader.next()
 line++
# process the CSV
...