Simple pretty CSV and TSV file viewer.

README.md

pretty_csv/pretty_tsv

These are some simple bash functions and scripts for making CSV/TSV files prettier on the command line

see http://stefaanlippens.net/pretty-csv.html for more information.

bash_functions.sh

##################################################### 
# Bash functions to put in .bashrc or .bash_aliases #
#####################################################

# For Debian/Ubuntu
function pretty_csv {
    column -t -s, -n "$@" | less -F -S -X -K
}
function pretty_tsv {
    column -t -s $'\t' -n "$@" | less -F -S -X -K
}

# For non-Debian systems
function pretty_csv {
    perl -pe 's/((?<=,)|(?<=^)),/ ,/g;' "$@" | column -t -s, | less  -F -S -X -K
}
function pretty_tsv {
    perl -pe 's/((?<=\t)|(?<=^))\t/ \t/g;' "$@" | column -t -s $'\t' | less  -F -S -X -K
}

pretty_csv.sh

#!/bin/bash
perl -pe 's/((?<=,)|(?<=^)),/ ,/g;' "$@" | column -t -s, | exec less  -F -S -X -K

pretty_tsv.sh

#!/bin/bash
perl -pe 's/((?<=\t)|(?<=^))\t/ \t/g;' "$@" | column -t -s $'\t' | exec less  -F -S -X -K

Thank you for providing this! But I failed to present the tsv with pretty_tsv.sh script.
Here is what I get:

Here is what the table originally looks like:

It seems the table only show the first column with pretty_tsv.

@yangyxt: given the "line ... is too long" warnings, I just think that your file is corrupt or at least has very wide columns

These are fantastic, @soxofaan. You just saved me a lot of hassle in viewing some long-running query results.

Thank you so much for sharing them!

Just grabbed your script. It's very nice. Thanks for sharing.

Thanks, great stuff.
I have commas inside string fields like this:

a,b,c
4207416,"[0,9,3,3,0,0,0,0,0,0]",56.0

So threw in an awk to replace separators outside strings to semicolons ( using @John1024's answer ):

function pretty_csv {
    perl -pe 's/((?<=,)|(?<=^)),/ ,/g;' "$@" \
        | awk -F\" '{for (i=1; i<=NF; i+=2) gsub(/,/,";",$i)} 1' OFS='"' \
        | column -t -s';' \
        | less  -F -S -X -K
}

which results in:

a        b                        c
4207416  "[0,9,3,3,0,0,0,0,0,0]"  56.0