Pipetable to CSV

emacs

data

Published

April 29, 2020

Sometimes I get out pipe tables in Emacs that I want to convert into a CSVto put somewhere else. This is really easy with regular expressions.

I often get data output from an SQL query like this

 text         | num  | value
--------------+------+-------------
   Some text  |  0.3 | 0.2
   Rah rah    |  7   | 0.00123(2 rows)

Running sed 's/\(^ *\| *|\|(.*\) */,/g' gives:

,text,num,value
--------------+------+-------------
,Some text,0.3,0.2
,Rah rah,7,0.00123,

I can delete the divider and then use as a CSV. Even better I can run this same regular expression in Vim or Emacs Evil mode as an Ex command. This won’t work if the data contains parentheses or pipes, but is useful for quick extracts.