cutr

Rust version of cut that respects delimiters

Synopsis

Usage: cutr [OPTIONS] 
       <--fields <FIELDS>|--bytes <BYTES>|--chars <CHARS>> [FILES]...

Arguments:
  [FILES]...  Input file(s) [default: -]

Options:
  -d, --delimiter <DELIMITER>                Field delimiter [default: "\t"]
  -o, --output-delimiter <OUTPUT_DELIMITER>  Field delimiter
  -f, --fields <FIELDS>                      Selected fields
  -b, --bytes <BYTES>                        Selected bytes
  -c, --chars <CHARS>                        Selected chars
  -h, --help                                 Print help
  -V, --version                              Print version

Rationale

The standard BSD/GNU versions of cut do not respect escaped field delimiter. For example, given a file of comma-separated values (CSV) like so:

$ cat tests/inputs/books.csv
Author,Year,Title
Émile Zola,1865,La Confession de Claude
Samuel Beckett,1952,Waiting for Godot
Jules Verne,1870,"20,000 Leagues Under the Sea"

The comma in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is seen as a field delimiter and so the column is truncated:

$ cut -d , -f 3 tests/inputs/books.csv
Title
La Confession de Claude
Waiting for Godot
"20

This Rust version respects the escaped delimiter:

$ cutr -d , -f 3 tests/inputs/books.csv
Title
La Confession de Claude
Waiting for Godot
"20,000 Leagues Under the Sea"

Further, cut allows random selection of field but does not respect the order specified by the user. For example, in the following command, I would expect cut to return the columns ordered Year and then Author, but the tool returns them in their file order:

$ cut -d , -f 2,1 tests/inputs/books.csv
Author,Year
Émile Zola,1865
Samuel Beckett,1952
Jules Verne,1870

This Rust version will return the selections in the order requested:

$ cutr -d , -f 2,1 tests/inputs/books.csv
Year,Author
1865,Émile Zola
1952,Samuel Beckett
1870,Jules Verne

When parsing delimited files, the output field delimiter defaults to the input delimiter, but you may specify an alternate value. For example, the input file may be CSV but I want the output delimited with the tab character:

$cutr -d , -o $'\t' -f 2,1 tests/inputs/books.csv
Year	Author
1865	Émile Zola
1952	Samuel Beckett
1870	Jules Verne

TODO

• The original cut tools allow for open selections such as -3 to indicate the first through third fields or 5- to indicate the fifth field to the end of the record. This version allows only closed ranges, so I would like to add this feature.

Author

Ken Youens-Clark kyclark@gmail.com