A CSV-iterator tool for Mac OS X

This is a tool that I use to iterate through the rows of a CSV file.

Requirements

• Mac OS X (tested on Ventura 13.0.1)
• OCaml (tested on version 4.13.1)
• Apple Numbers

Assumptions

I assume you have a CSV file generated from an Apple Numbers spreadsheet. I mention Apple Numbers because CSV is a surprisingly unstandardised format, and my tool is quite specialised for the dialect of CSV that Apple Numbers exports. Other CSV files might or might not work. In particular:

• values are comma-separated (as you would expect),

• values that do (or could) contain commas or newlines are wrapped in double-quotes,

• but empty values are not wrapped in double-quotes,

• double-quotes that appear inside values are replaced with two consecutive double-quotes (so "this is an ""example"" of a valid value")

Getting started

Run make.

This repo includes a sample CSV file. To use it to see how the tool works, run the following command:

./csv_iterator -csv database.csv -cmd "echo \$firstname got \$percent%."

You can also run make install to copy the executable into ~/bin. Then, if ~/bin is in your $PATH, you can run csv_iterator from any directory.

What the tool does

1. The tool creates a new file called database.csv.tmp in which "" has been globally replaced with ”. This makes a Numbers-generated CSV file easier to parse (see note above).

2. For each non-header row of database.csv.tmp, the tool runs field1=v1 ... fieldN=vN eval 'command', where field1, ..., fieldN are the column names of the CSV file and v1, ..., vN are the values taken by those fields in the current row. In other words, the command command is run in a shell where the current row's values have been assigned to environment variables of the same name.

3. You can set the -dryrun flag so that the commands to be run are printed to the terminal but not actually executed.

4. If you set the -onlyfirstrow flag, the tool will stop after the first (non-header) row. This can be useful when testing.

Note:

• I wrote \$firstname rather than $firstname above in order to prevent the firstname variable from being expanded when calling csv_iterator. It should only be expanded when the generated commands are executed.

• Best avoid having backticks in the CSV file, as Bash might see those as commands to be executed.

• Column names in the CSV file mustn't begin with a digit (because environment variables can't begin with a digit).