terminal-window viewer for tab-delimited files in *nix?

Question

I work with a lot of tab-delimited data files, with varying columns of uncertain length.

Typically, the way people view these files is to bring them down from the server to their Windows or Mac machine, and then open them up in Excel. This is certainly fully-featured, allowing filtering and other nice options. But sometimes, you just want to look at something quickly on the command line.

I wrote a bare-bones utility to display the first<n>lines of a file like so:

--- line 1 ---
1:{header-1} 2:{header-2} 3:...

--- line 2 ---
1:{data-1} 2:{data-2} 3:...

This is, obviously, very lame, but it's enough to pipe through grep, or figure out which header columns to use "cut -f" on.

Is there a *nix-based viewer for a terminal session which will display rows and columns of a tab-delimited file and let you move the viewing window over the file, or otherwise look at data?

I don't want to write this myself; instead, I'd just make a reformatter which would replace tabs with spaces for padding so I could open the file up in emacs and see aligned columns. But if there's already a tool out there to do something like this, that'd be great!

(Or, I could just live with Excel.)

Answer 1

There is a Unix text-mode spreadsheet called sc which may work for your use. You will probably need to pass the file through psc to convert it to the file format that sc uses.

Answer 2

This works to output a pretty print version of a tab delimited file

column -t -s $'\t' list-of-entries.txt

Answer 3

Open the file in vim and set tab stop to something high, so the columns will be lined up. If you are not familiar with vim, first start it up:

vim some_file.csv

Then set tab stop to some high value, so the columns will be lined up. Type:

:set tabstop=20

Should lines become too long, you should also turn off wrapping, so you can scroll sideways instead of wrapping the text around:

:set nowrap

Moving around: there are several ways, but the most straightforward ones like arrow keys and pgup/pgdown/home/end will work. Some other useful movement commands:

CTRL+U: move half screen up
CTRL+D: move half screen down
gg: move to top
G: move to bottom

You can search for text the same way you would do in man:

/regular_expression (search forward)
?regular_expression (search backward)

Then type "n" to find the next match, and "N" to find the previous one.

You can also navigate using the mouse if your terminal supports it, and you type:

:set mouse=a

Edit: I forgot that you can exit with:

:q (if you haven't changed the text)
:wq (to save it before quitting)
:q! (to abandon changes)

Answer 4

There is another solution, which involves a script. Save this script to, for example, tab.pl.

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;

my @lines;
# first read the file into a list of lists
while (<>)
{
    chomp; # remove the newline from the end of the line
    my @fields = split("\t");
    push @lines, \@fields;
}
my @lengths;
# calculate the maximum lengths of each field
foreach (@lines)
{
    for (my $i = 0; $i < scalar @$_; $i++)
    {
        $lengths[$i] = $lengths[$i] < length $$_[$i] ? length $$_[$i] : $lengths[$i];
    }
}
# now print the text aligned
foreach (@lines)
{
    for (my $i = 0; $i < scalar @$_; $i++)
    {
        print $$_[$i], " " x ($lengths[$i] - length ($$_[$i]) + 1);
    }
    print "\n";
}

Then just type:

perl tab.pl some_file.csv | less

Or save the result to a file and open it with your favourite text editor:

perl tab.pl some_file.csv > result.txt

Answer 5

pr allows you to expand tabs to a given number of spaces with -e. Don't forget to pass -t -T so that it doesn't actually format the whole page for printing.