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How to pretty-print / view tabular file (e.g., CSV) from the command line?

Asked 2009-12-09T17:01:16.420
438

What are some command-line CSV viewers for Linux or OSX? I'm thinking of something like less but that spaces out the columns in a more readable way. (I'd be fine with opening it with OpenOffice Calc or Excel, but that's way too overpowered for just looking at the data like I need to.) Having horizontal and vertical scrolling would be great.

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Tabview: lightweight python curses command line CSV file viewer (and also other tabular Python data, like a list of lists) is here on Github

Features:

  • Python 2.7+, 3.x
  • Unicode support
  • Spreadsheet-like view for easily visualizing tabular data
  • Vim-like navigation (h,j,k,l, g(top), G(bottom), 12G goto line 12, m - mark, ' - goto mark, etc.)
  • Toggle persistent header row
  • Dynamically resize column widths and gap
  • Sort ascending or descending by any column. 'Natural' order sort for numeric values.
  • Full-text search, n and p to cycle between search results
  • 'Enter' to view the full cell contents
  • Yank cell contents to clipboard
  • F1 or ? for keybindings
  • Can also use from python command line to visualize any tabular data (e.g. list-of-lists)
answered 2013-01-17T03:35:30.693

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