Awesome CSV

A carefully curated list of CSV-related tools and resources

CSV remains the most futuristic data format from the distant past.

XML has risen and fallen. JSON is just a flash in the pan. YAML is a poisoned chalice. CSV will outlast them all.

When the final cockroach breathes her last breath, her dying act will be to scratch her date of death in a CSV file for posterity.

Contents

• Tools
  • Repair or Validate CSV
  • Treat CSV as SQL
  • Convert to or from CSV
  • CSV <-> JSON
• Essays
• Data
• Conferences
• Standards
• META: Other similar lists
• Code of Conduct
• Funtribute
• Footnotes

Here are some awesome tools for dealing with CSV:

Tools

• NimbleText/Live - Use patterns to manipulate CSV; the world’s simplest code generator *.
• PapaParse - A powerful in-browser CSV parser.
• d3-dsv - d3.js parser and formatter module for delimiter-separated values.
• CSVKit - CSV utilities that includes csvsql / csvgrep / csvstat and more.
• XSV - A fast CSV command-line toolkit written in Rust.
• sed (gnu tool) - Stream editor.
• gawk (gnu tool) - Text processing and data extraction using awk.
• awk by example - Comprehensive examples of using awk.
• Miller - Like sed / awk / cut / join / sort etc for name-indexed data such as CSV.
• ParaText - CSV parsing at 2.5 GB per second.
• CSVGet - Get structured data from sites as CSV.
• CSVfix - A tool for manipulating CSV data.
• Tad - A fast free cross-platform CSV viewer.
• Nvd3-tags - A tiny library for making charts from csv data.
• Powershell: Import-CSV - Powerful in-built facility for dealing with CSV (example).
• CSV Tools - A collection of useful CSV utilities.
• graph-cli - Flexible command line tool to create graphs from CSV data.
• CSV to SQL - Online tool to create insert/update/delete etc from CSV data.
• C#: kbCSV - An efficient, easy to use .NET parsing and writing library for CSV.
• csvprintf - UNIX command line utility for parsing and formatting output based on CSV files.
• Mockaroo - Random data generator for CSV / JSON / SQL / Excel.
• Ron’s CSV Editor - Handles big files, does miraculous things. A timeless editor for a timeless format.
• Rainbow CSV plugins - Collection of text editor plugins for CSV/TSV syntax highlighting. Available for Vim, VS Code, Atom, Sublime Text and other editors.
• Mighty Merge - join/union csv files.

Repair or Validate CSV

• Csvlint.go - Command line tool for validating CSV files against RFC 4180.
• csvstudio - A smart app to repair syntax errors in very large CSV files.
• scrubcsv - Remove bad records from a CSV file and normalize (requires rust)
• reconcile-csv - Find relationships between a set of related CSVs

Generate Table Schema

• CSV Schema — Analyzes a CSV file and generates database table schema, all within the browser
• Wanted: More tools in this category.

Treat CSV as SQL

• TextQL - Execute SQL against CSV or TSV.
• Datasette Facets - Faceted browse and a JSON API for any CSV File or SQLite DB.
• q - Run SQL Directly on CSV Files
• RBQL - Rainbow Query Language, a SQL-like language with JavaScript or Python backend.
• PSKit Query — Powershell module lets you run simple queries over objects, including imported with csv

Convert to or from CSV

• CSV to Table - Convert CSV files to searchable and sortable HTML table.

CSV <-> JSON

• Agnes - Two way Csv to Json **.
• csv2json - online tool to convert your CSV or TSV formatted data to JSON and vice versa.
• csv-to-json - Easy, privacy-friendly and offline-first online csv to json converter.

Essays

Once you’ve found the perfect data serialization file format, you stop looking

David Wengier

• Thinking about CSV - Martin Fenner.
• In Praise of CSV - Waldo Jaquith.
• Stop Rolling Your Own CSV Parser! - Leon Bambrick ***.
• So You Want To Write Your Own CSV code? - Thomas Burette.
• Falsehoods Programmers Believe About CSVs - Jesse Donat.
• ASCII Delimited Text - Not CSV or TAB delimited text - Ronald Duncan.

Data

• US Data.gov - 18789+ CSV datasets.
• Australian Government Open Data - 2715+ CSV datasets.
• Reference data in csv - Easy-to-use reference data in CSV and JSON formats.
• awesome-public-datasets - A topic-centric list of high-quality open datasets in public domains.
• United Nations data - Data from the UN
• Fake Name Generator - Generate fake names with other identity data in bulk for testing.

Conferences

• csv,conf - A community conference for data makers everywhere.

Standards

The wonderful thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from.
—(Possibly) Grace Hopper.

• RFC 4180 (html version) - “Common format and MIME Type for Comma-Separated Values (CSV) Files”.
  • Definition of the CSV Format
  • MIME Type Registration of text/csv
• W3C: Model for Tabular Data and Metadata on the Web
• CSV Schema Language - A language for defining and validating CSV data.
• csv,specs - Comma-Separated Values (CSV) Format Specifications (and Tests) incl. CSV v1.0, CSV v1.1, CSV Strict, CSV <3 Numerics, CSV<3 JSON, CSV <3 YAML.
• Tabular Data Resource - A Data Resource specialized for describing tabular data like CSV files or spreadsheets
• CSVY - A standard for adding a YAML header to CSV files to describe their format

META: Other similar lists

• structured-text-tools - List of command line tools for manipulating CSV / XML / HTML / JSON / INI etc.
• META-META - This list as CSV.
• META-META-META - A NimbleText pattern that produces this markdown page from this list as a CSV.

Code of Conduct

See Code of Conduct

Funtribute

To experience the fun of contributing, see Contributing

Footnotes

* I’m the author of NimbleText. Of course I put it first on the list. If I didn’t personally rate it I wouldn’t have spent so much time making and improving it.

** I wrote agnes but don’t really endorse it for others to use (thus haven’t migrated the source code to GitHub). It’s slow and non-streaming. I’d go with papa-parse. On the plus side, agnes has a more comprehensive test suite and simpler api than most.

*** Mine too.

License

To the extent possible under law, Leon Bambrick has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to this work.