Lots of features, but slow because written in Python. A faster version may be csvtools. Also some annoyances like obtuse header handing and missing features like grep + cut in one go: csvgrep and select column in csvkit.

csvgrep from csvkit

Simple example:

printf '00,11,22\n33,44,55\n' | csvgrep -H -c2 -r '^11$' | tail -n+2

output:

00,11,22

More verbose description:

csvgrep and select column in csvkit

There seems to be no way without a pipe, you seem to need to reparse the columns, e.g. the tutorial at: csvkit.readthedocs.io/en/latest/tutorial/2_examining_the_data.html#csvgrep-find-the-data-you-need does:

csvcut -c county,item_name,total_cost data.csv | csvgrep -c county -m LANCASTER

Asked at: stackoverflow.com/questions/77266699/how-to-fillter-a-csv-file-with-csvgrep-and-print-only-certain-columns

csvtool

A compiled executable under /usr/bin/csvtool, has an Ubuntu 23.04 package: manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/lunar/en/man1/csvtool.1.html

There seems to be no sane filtering mechanism however: stackoverflow.com/questions/46540752/using-csvtool-call-to-filter-csv-in-bash

csvtools

github.com/maroofi/csvtool

A fast version of a somewhat subset of csvkit, written in C.

Build failed with undefined reference to pcre_config on Ubuntu 23.04: github.com/DavyLandman/csvtools/issues/18

Unfortunately it is lacking some basic options, like optional header + selecting column by index on csvgrep (though csvcut has it). The project seems kind of dead.

Also unclear if it allows to filter + print only selected columns.

xsv

github.com/BurntSushi/xsv

Is this the one?

JSON

JSON trailing comma

stackoverflow.com/questions/201782/can-you-use-a-trailing-comma-in-a-json-object

The fact that you cannot have trailing commans in lists or dicts as in 3, at:

{
  "asdf": [
    1,
    2,
    3,
  ]
}

is one of the most infuriating design choices of all time!!!

jq (2012-)

jq ignore missing attribute

echo '[{"a": 1, "b": 2}, {"b": 3}]' | jq '.[] | select(.a) | .a'

Output:

and no empty lines as desired.

Bibliography:

stackoverflow.com/questions/42097410/how-to-check-for-presence-of-key-in-jq-before-iterating-over-the-values

Hierarchical Data Format (HDF)

Unified Modeling Language (UML)

XML (Extensible Markup Language)

Do you know what is worse than XML? Pseudo XML: stackoverflow.com/questions/5558502/is-html5-valid-xml/39560454#39560454

Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML)

XML predecessor.

IBM Generalized Markup Language

SGML predecessor.

XPath

XPath kind of died with the rise of CSS selectors around the beginnning of the 2010's. But that is a shame. XPath is a good standard, and was generally more powerful than CSS selectors for many many years.