How to extract one column of a csv file

If I have a csv file, is there a quick bash way to print out the contents of only any single column? It is safe to assume that each row has the same number of columns, but each column's content would have different length.

Solution 1:

You could use awk for this. Change '$2' to the nth column you want.

awk -F "\"*,\"*" '{print $2}' textfile.csv

Solution 2:

yes. cat mycsv.csv | cut -d ',' -f3 will print 3rd column.

Solution 3:

The simplest way I was able to get this done was to just use csvtool. I had other use cases as well to use csvtool and it can handle the quotes or delimiters appropriately if they appear within the column data itself.

csvtool format '%(2)\n' input.csv

Replacing 2 with the column number will effectively extract the column data you are looking for.