MTSV for Python

A parser and a generator for Multi-Sheet Tab-Separated Values (MTSV), with integrations for spreadsheets (ODS) and data tools (Apache Arrow). The version is the version field of pyproject.toml.

• Specification
• Repository

Install

From the repository. A Python that an operating system manages does not accept packages directly, so install into a virtual environment. Run these from the root of the repository, one folder above this one:

python3 -m venv .venv
.venv/bin/pip install ./python

For the Arrow integration, which also installs pyarrow:

.venv/bin/pip install "./python[arrow]"

Read and write MTSV

Sheets are a list of dictionaries with "sheet name", "header", and "records", the same shape as the conformance results.

import mtsv

with open("book.mtsv", "rb") as file:
    sheets = mtsv.load(file)

with open("book.mtsv", "wb") as file:
    mtsv.dump(sheets, file)

loads and dumps work on strings.

Spreadsheets (ODS)

from mtsv.integrations import ods

with open("book.ods", "wb") as file:
    ods.dump(sheets, file)

with open("book.ods", "rb") as file:
    sheets = ods.load(file)

From the command line:

python -m mtsv.integrations.ods book.mtsv book.ods
python -m mtsv.integrations.ods book.ods book.mtsv

Data tools (Apache Arrow)

from mtsv.integrations import arrow

tables = arrow.to_arrow(sheets)
sheets = arrow.from_arrow(tables)

tables is a list of (sheet name, pyarrow.Table) pairs.

What is left behind

MTSV holds sheets, names, rows, and text. Going out to ODS or Arrow keeps all of it, with two ODS exceptions: characters that XML 1.0 does not allow raise ValueError, and empty rows and columns at the edge of a sheet do not come back from ODS, so a sheet of only empty fields comes back as an empty sheet. Coming back in, anything else (formatting, formulas, types, missing values) raises ValueError by default. To confirm and leave it behind, pass errors="ignore", or --errors ignore on the command line. Text that MTSV cannot hold, such as a tab or line break inside a value, always raises ValueError. So does an Arrow column whose values cannot be text at all, such as binary, a list, or a struct.

Layout

Test

From the root of the repository:

.venv/bin/python -m unittest discover -s python/tests

License

MIT