This repo provides a bash library called csv.bash which parses lines of comma-delimited-values into an array.
Here's example/parse-stdin.bash:
#!/bin/bash
source csv.bash # load the library
while IFS= read -r CSV_ROW;do # read stdin line by line into CSV_ROW
csv_row_to_cols # parse CSV_ROW into CSV_COLS
printf "%s\n" "${CSV_COLS[@]}" # do something with CSV_COLS!
done
It reads a stream of csv input and prints each parsed column on a new line. csv_row_to_cols parses the global variable CSV_ROW and populates the results in CSV_COLS (returning values via globals is necessary in bash).
echo 'foo,"bar,baz",,"boo\"",' | example/parse-stdin.bash
foo
"bar,baz"
""
"boo\""
""
This example shows the default behavior, but that can be changed by setting these global variables:
CSV_TER="" # terminator for rows
CSV_DEL="," # delimiter for columns
CSV_QUO='"' # quote char - quoted delimiters are ignored
CSV_ESC="\\" # escape char for quote char
CSV_CON=1 # consecutive delimiters declare empty columns
CSV_EMP='""' # empty column replacement value
For example you can set CSV_DEL to tab to parse tab-delimited data. Less obviously, you could use csv.bash to read command arguments from input and split them into words, instead of using xargs, which is slow.
#/bin/bash
source csv.bash
CSV_DEL=" "
CSV_ROW='foo "bar baz"' # bash will wordsplit like this (foo,"bar,baz")
csv_row_to_cols # CSV_COLS=(foo,"bar baz")
...
All global variables are prepended with CSV_ to avoid name clashes with other code. And that's not all the global variables either! CSV_COLC is set to the number of columns parsed, which is handy to use as the length of $CSV_COLS which bash may not report correctly if it contains empty strings. CSV_ROWC is an incrementing row counter, which you may want to reset to 0 if your code is parsing different inputs in the same process.