SimpleCSVCLI

SimpleTableCLI is a lightweight command-line tool for exploring and manipulating CSV files. It provides focused utilities for loading, inspecting, selecting, filtering, and formatting CSV data from the terminal. This repository contains a minimal, working implementation designed to be extended.

Table of contents

• Project overview
• Screen recordings
• Features
• Installation
• Quick start
• Tests
• Project layout
• Notes and Takeaways
• License

Project overview

I built this project to learn the skill of building simple CLI tools according to a clearly scoped specification. And, for that matter, the general skill of completing a project with a clear finishing condition. I also used it as an opportunity to strengthen my ability to think through writing good tests and, critically, writing testable modules.

Screen recordings

Screen recordings of use will go here.

Features

• Load local CSV files
• Inspect columns
• Select columns and project subsets of data
• Filter rows
• Basic regex search utilities across fields
• Unit tests covering core functionality
• Pipe-friendly output (raw CSV when piped, formatted tables in terminal)

Installation

This project targets modern Python (3.11+). Use a virtual environment for development.

# macOS / zsh
python -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt

For development installation:

pip install -e .

Quick start

Display CLI help and available subcommands:

python main.py --help

Tests

Run the test suite with pytest:

pytest -q

Project layout

• main.py — CLI entrypoint
• cli/ — core modules implementing parsing, loading, filtering, and formatting
  • parser.py
  • data_loader.py
  • columns.py
  • filter.py
  • select.py
  • formatter.py
  • search_utils.py
• tests/ — unit tests and testdata
• requirements.txt, pyproject.toml — dependency and packaging metadata

Notes and Takeaways

TO-DO

License

TO-DO

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