csv-flat

Intro

This is a pair of scripts which convert csvs to and from a “flat” format. For example, this csv:

city,population
Poznań,536151

is converted to

A1:city
B1:population
A2:Poznań
B2:536151

The main reason to perform these conversions is that diffing csvs with lots of columns when only a few cells were changed results in a hardly legible diff, while diffing the “flat” versions produced by this script gives a human-readable diff.

Another use-case is performing text operations on csvs. For example, assume that you want to replace all instances of the string source with dest, but only in the second column. Performing this on a csv in a text editor may be tricky. With the “flat” format it can be achieved with sed --expression='/^B/s/source/dest/g'.

Usage

Flattening a csv: cat input.csv | npm csv-flat.js > output. Unflattening a csv: cat input.csv | npm csv-unflat.js > output.