csvquerytool 0.0.3

Execute SQL queries on CSV files.

This module provides a very simple command-line tool for running arbitrary SQL queries on CSV files. It’s useful for situations where you need to quickly explore and manipulate CSV files, where using a full database is often overkill.

Say we have the following two files:

employees.csv:

surname,department_id
Rafferty,31
Jones,33
Steinberg,33
Robinson,34
Smith,34
John,

departments.csv:

department_id,department_name
31,Sales
33,Engineering
34,Clerical
35,Marketing

Let’s load these two CSV files:

$ csvquery employees.csv departments.csv

At this point, you will be presented with an interactive SQL console:

* file 'employees.csv' loaded into table 'csv'
* file 'departments.csv' loaded into table 'csv2'
SQL Interactive Console
=>

You can see that the file employees.csv was loaded into an SQL table named csv and the file departments.csv into a table named csv2. From here, you can start running whatever SQL queries you want.

Let’s select all of the records from the employees table:

=> SELECT * FROM csv
surname,department_id
Rafferty,31
Jones,33
Steinberg,33
Robinson,34
Smith,34
John,None

And now let’s join the employees table to the departments table:

=> SELECT csv.surname, csv2.department_name FROM csv NATURAL JOIN csv2
surname,department_name
Rafferty,Sales
Jones,Engineering
Steinberg,Engineering
Robinson,Clerical
Smith,Clerical

Press ^D to exit the SQL console when you are done.

You can also specify an SQL query as an argument to csvquery (which is more useful for scripts, where you can’t use the interactive console):

$ csvquery -q "SELECT csv.surname, csv2.department_name FROM csv NATURAL JOIN csv2" departments.csv

The output of this command is CSV formatted, so it can be redirected to an output CSV file if required:

$ csvquery -q "SELECT csv.surname, csv2.department_name FROM csv NATURAL JOIN csv2" departments.csv > employee_departments.csv

Warning: All of the input CSV files are loaded into memory to perform the queries. This means that this module is not appropriate for processing very large CSV files.