After stumbling upon the same issue, I realized that this is not a bug, but intended behavior.
The output of csvtool is always a valid csv-formatted record again. It removes any obsolete double quotes, but it keeps all *necessary* double quotes. In your example, csvtool gives the following output $csvtool col 1,2,3 test.csv foo,"""Hello "" World!""",bar which is indeed a correct csv-record. Moreover, the double quotes are neccessary, since the unescaped output foo,"Hello " World!",bar would yield a corrupt csv-record. The same holds even true for the output's separator char as defined by the -u flag. Consider the following example: $ echo "\"single,field\",next one" | csvtool col 1,2 - "single,field",next one Again the surrounding quotes are *not* removed because they are mandatory because of the comma inside the field. However, when specifying by -u ; another output separator, the double quotes become obsolete and will be removed: $ echo "\"single,field\",next one" | csvtool col 1,2 -u ";" - single,field;next one Summarized: csvtool focuses on generating valid csv output, *not* on extracting individual field values in always their unescaped form. Unfortunately, this means that one needs another commandline tool to post-process the somtimes-escaped-sometimes-unescaped output of csvtool when trying to use it in scripts to extract a single column. It could be a feature request (and indeed a very helpful feature) to support a flag that forces the output to be unescaped without any surrounding double quotes, e.g., csvtool --unquoted col 2 test.csv could give "Hello " World!" then, which is intended for further processing, rather than """Hello "" World!""". -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1714760 Title: "csvtool" returns wrong output when escaping double quotes To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ocaml-csv/+bug/1714760/+subscriptions -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
