Awesome CSV

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

• Awesome CSV Tools
  • Repair or Validate CSV
  • Treat CSV as SQL
  • Convert to or from CSV
  • CSV <-> JSON
• Awesome CSV Essays
• Awesome Data in CSV
• Awesome Conferences About CSV
• Awesome CSV Standards
• META: Other Lists of CSV Tools and References
• Awesome License
• Footnotes

Here are some awesome tools for dealing with CSV:

Awesome 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
• StreamingPivot: pivot and visualize CSV data purely in the browser
• 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
• 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
• Mockaroo: random data generator for CSV / JSON / SQL / Excel

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

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

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

Awesome CSV Essays

• Thinking about CSV: Martin Fenner
• In Praise of CSV: Waldo Jaquith
• Stop Rolling Your Own CSV Parser!^***: Leon B
• So You Want To Write Your Own CSV code?: Thomas Burette
• Falsehoods Programmers Believe About CSVs: Jesse Donat

Awesome Data in CSV

• 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

Awesome Conferences About CSV

• csv,conf: A community conference for data makers everywhere

Awesome CSV Standards

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

• RFC 4180: "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

META: Other Lists of CSV Tools and References

• 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

Awesome License

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

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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.