Oil will parse text so you don't have to!

Links / Use Cases

• What is a Data Frame? (In Python, R, and SQL) (blog)
• Git Log in HTML (blog)
  • After that I wrote Structured Data Over Pipes
  • And Unix Tools
• Oil and the R Language
• Other Oil Use Cases:
  • release.sh generates releases.html
  • benchmarks/*.{sh,R} generates osh-parser report, etc.
• lobste.rs comment on Oil philosophy for structured data (2019)
• Hacker News comment on the philosophy for structured data (September 2020)
• Oil's Table Type vs. Relations (lobste.rs, July 2021)

Design Docs

• QSN: A Familiar String Interchange Format -- spec done, encoder done, still need decoder
• QTT -- An extension to TSV that builds on top of QSN.
  • older: TSV2 Proposal
• each Keyword in Oil -- augments xargs, uses TSV2
• Explicit Framing Protocol Proposal

Curiosities

• Shell Almost Has a JSON Analogue

Projects

All of these are obviously supported because Oil is a shell! But there are advantages to a built-in expression language. (It's deferred for 2020.)

dbohdan/structured-text-tools - A list of command line tools for manipulating structured text data

• CSV / TSV / etc.

  • https://github.com/johnkerl/miller -- Miller is like awk, sed, cut, join, and sort for name-indexed data such as CSV, TSV, and tabular JSON
    • GNU flex lexer for its language: https://github.com/johnkerl/miller/blob/master/c/parsing/mlr_dsl_lexer.l
    • Lemon parser (like sqlite!): https://github.com/johnkerl/miller/blob/master/c/parsing/mlr_dsl_parse.y
  • https://csvkit.readthedocs.io/en/1.0.3/
  • https://github.com/BurntSushi/xsv -- A fast CSV command line toolkit written in Rust
  • https://github.com/sustrik/uxy -- parses output of ls and ps into a table-like format, written in Python

• JSON

  • https://github.com/benbernard/RecordStream -- commandline tools for slicing and dicing JSON records
  • https://github.com/aanastasiou/pyjunix
  • http://jsonlines.org/ and http://ndjson.org/ -- what's the difference?
  • https://github.com/kellyjonbrazil/jc from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22366638
    • parses output of netstat etc. and outputs JSON. Similar to uxy above.
    • Bringing the Unix Philosophy into the 21st Century (2019, discussed 8/2021)
  • https://github.com/tomnomnom/gron -- convert JSON to grepable and sedable form, and back.
  • query-json thread with many links -- For everyone pining for a Jq with a different syntax: I have a bunch of links to alternatives collected, you might want to try some of them (some may be for different things than JSON)
  • https://github.com/tomnomnom/gron -- Make JSON Greppable

• HTML

  • https://lobste.rs/s/m4nhpb/danburzo_hred_reduce_html_json_from

• Other Text

  • https://www.gnu.org/software/recutils/

• Binary

  • https://relational-pipes.globalcode.info/v_0/index.xhtml -- binary format

• Common Output Format for unix-like tools: https://github.com/aniou/cof/wiki/Draft (draft rather than code)

  • netstat example, etc.

• More links/projects: https://lobste.rs/s/zvallq/pretty_csv_viewing_on_command_line

  • VisiData looks like an interesting UI.

• glib GVariants: https://blogs.gnome.org/alexl/2012/08/10/rethinking-the-shell-pipeline/

  • links to https://code.google.com/archive/p/hotwire-shell/

Examples

Miller:

$ mlr --icsv --opprint --barred \
  put '$tiv_delta = $tiv_2012 - $tiv_2011; unset $tiv_2011, $tiv_2012' \
  then sort -nr tiv_delta flins.csv 

It has a nice expression language. You compute new columns as a function of older ones, then drop them.