Pretty Print a CSV file

Have you ever had a csv (comma separated file) file that you wanted to see nicely and did not want to open up a spreadsheet editor just to be able to see it in a readable way. Well the following command works with most csv files and will do just that:

column -s, -t 

If you have commas within your data you might want to use the following longer but handy linux command:

python -c 'import sys,csv; c = csv.reader(sys.stdin); [sys.stdout.write("^M".join(map(repr,r))+"\n") for r in c];' 

Have you ever had a csv (comma separated file) file that you wanted to see nicely and did not want to open up a spreadsheet editor just to be able to see it in a readable way. Well the following command works with most csv files and will do just that: column -s, -t