csvpretty

README

CSVPretty

CSVPretty is a small tool that pretty prints CSV files.

There are many tools online that claim to pretty print CSV files when really they are just reformatted for display. This tool produces files which actually are CSV files, just with the columns aligned with the Elastic Tabstops algorithm.

The CSV files should produce identical data when parsed provided your CSV parser is configured to drop preceeding whitespace in CSV records (see Limitations).

Example

For the input:

test.csv

Name, Subspecies, Species, Genus
West African Giraffe, G. c. peralta, G. camelopardalis, Giraffa
Meerkat, , s.Suricata, Suricata
Dog, C. l. familiaris, C. lupus, Canis

csvpretty -input test.csv -output test_out.csv produces:

test_out.csv

Name,                   Subspecies,         Species
West African Giraffe,   G. c. peralta,      G. camelopardalis
Meerkat,                ,                   s.Suricata
Dog,                    C. l. familiaris,   C. lupus

Installation

With a working Go setup, and $GOPATH/bin in your $PATH:

go get github.com/zemnmez/monorepo/go/cmd/csvpretty -u

If you want to quickly use csvpretty and you have go installed, you can just:

go run github.com/zemnmez/monorepo/go/cmd/csvpretty

With whatever args you desire.

Usage With go generate

You can use csvpretty in conjunction with go generate to automatically pretty print CSVs. This is best used in conjection with go mod, which will manage your tooling versions automagically.

To do this, add a go generate line to a .go file like this:

//go:generate go run github.com/zemnmez/csvpretty -input myfile.csv -w

Limitations

The only limitation to CSVPretty is that your CSV parser drops leading whitespace in records. This is a common option that's tenuously considered part of the CSV format. In Go, for example you can set the TrimLeadingSpace field of csv.Reader to true for this.

License

MIT License

Copyright (c) 2019 Zemnmez

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.