tass-0.4.0 is not a library.
It's like less, but for CSV! It looks like this:
Installing
If you already have rust, you can install tass like this:
$ cargo install tass
Usage
You can pass a filename, or pipe data to stdin:
$ tass mydata.csv
$ cat mydata.csv | tass
| Key | Action |
|---|---|
| Up/j, PageUp | Move up one row, page |
| Down/k,PageDown | Move down one row, page |
| Left/h | Move left one column |
| Right/l | Move right one column |
| Home, End | Move to start/end of file |
| number g | Move to line $number |
| f | Move to end and auto-scroll as new rows come in |
| /, ? | Search, reverse-search for string |
| n, N | Jump to next, previous match |
| q/Esc | Quit |
Comparison to other tools
| Tool | Functionality | Filetypes | Streaming | File size |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| tass | Viewing data, basic searching and filtering | CSV | yes | Large (bigger than memory is fine) |
| VisiData | As above, plus: summary stats, plots, ... | CSV, JSON, ... | yes | Medium (up to perhaps 50% of memory) |
| Excel/Calc/Numbers/Google Sheets | As above, plus: it's a spreadsheet | CSV, xls, ods, ... | no | Small (1M row limit) |
My advice is to use the most featureful tool you can get away with. However, if you are cursed with multi-gigabyte CSV files, then here are some tips:
- If you want to see summary statistics but don't care about the underlying data itself, you can still use VisiData/Excel/etc.: just downsample it first with xsv. This will reduce the precision of your stats and plots, but not the overall shape (probably).
- If you do want exact answers to complex questions, consider converting your CSV file to a sqlite database.
- Alternatively, take a look at frawk - it's really nice.