cutpaste 0.0.3

cutpaste

Unix-like cut and paste commands with multi-character delimiter support.

Unlike the standard Unix cut which only supports single-character delimiters, pycut and pypaste can split and join on strings like ::, ->, or any delimiter you need.

Installation

pip install cutpaste

pycut - Extract fields from lines

Extract specific fields from each line of input, using a delimiter.

pycut -d DELIMITER -f FIELDS [FILE...]

Options:

• -d, --delimiter - String delimiter to split on (default: TAB). Supports escape sequences like \t, \n.
• -f, --field - Field(s) to extract (required). 1-based indexing.
• -v, --version - Show version and exit.

Field specification formats:

• Single field: -f 2 (extract field 2)
• Multiple fields: -f 1,3,5 (extract fields 1, 3, and 5)
• Range: -f 2-4 (extract fields 2, 3, and 4)
• Mixed: -f 1,3-5,7 (extract fields 1, 3, 4, 5, and 7)

Examples:

# Extract the second field from a space-delimited file
pycut -d ' ' -f 2 data.txt

# Extract first and third columns from CSV
pycut -d ',' -f 1,3 data.csv

# Multi-character delimiter - extract second part of "key::value" lines
pycut -d '::' -f 2 config.txt

# Use with pipes
echo "a->b->c" | pycut -d '->' -f 2
# Output: b

# Extract a range of fields
echo "one,two,three,four,five" | pycut -d ',' -f 2-4
# Output: two,three,four

# Read from stdin explicitly
cat file.txt | pycut -d '\t' -f 1 -

pypaste - Merge files line by line

Merge corresponding lines from multiple files, joining them with a delimiter.

pypaste -d DELIMITER [FILE...]

Options:

• -d, --delimiter - String delimiter to join with (default: TAB). Supports escape sequences like \t, \n.
• -v, --version - Show version and exit.

Examples:

# Merge two files with tab delimiter (default)
pypaste names.txt ages.txt

# Merge with comma delimiter
pypaste -d ',' col1.txt col2.txt col3.txt

# Multi-character delimiter
pypaste -d ' | ' left.txt right.txt

# Use stdin as one of the inputs
seq 5 | pypaste -d ',' - letters.txt

Streaming

Both commands process input line-by-line without loading entire files into memory. This means they work efficiently with:

• Large files
• Piped input
• Infinite streams

License

MIT