This is a very simple PERL script that may be quite useful when working with delimited text files, especially for those of you who write/maintain Delimited Text drivers in IDM. You can use it in a few different ways:

• Convert a file from one delimiter to another

• Parse a file to make sure each field has quotes around it (instead of only those with spaces)

• Recreate your file but only specific columns

• Recreate your file with the columns in any order you want

• All of the above combined

If you're good with the Linux command line tools, combine this script with grep, sed, awk, wc, etc. to do all sorts of things. I wrote it so that I could quickly look through a large CSV file I get from our HR system and return only the fields I want. For example, using this script and other built in tools I can quickly figure out how many active employees we have within a specific business unit without having to load the CSV into a database and query it that way.

The script was written for Linux, but seems to work in Windows too (tested using Active Perl base installation).

CSV Parser v1.0.2 - Parse data from a delimited text file.

Usage: csvparser.pl -c [file]

Required:
   -c | --csv [File]            Specify a CSV with the input data

Options:
   -i | --inputdelim [char]     Input file delimiter (Default: ",")
   -o | --outputdelim [char]    Output using different delimiter (Default: ",")
   -f | --fields [#,#,#,#]      Fields to print (base 0) - Order will be maintained. (Default: All)
   -q | --quotes                Include quotes around the fields (Default: Off)
   -h | --help                  Help!
   -d | --deubg                 Enable debugging info