Specify Tab delimiter

[nickybpm]

I'm workign with some "TSV" (tab delimited) files. I haven't figured out how to specify tab as a delimiter, since it's not really possible to type a tab into my shell. Is there some way to do it?

[lzakharov]

Yes, sure. You can pass your custom delimiter via -d (or --delimiter) flag. You can run csv2md -h to see more information about the available options.

[nickybpm]

Thank you for the reply. I understand that there is the -d flag, but I don’t know how I can use that to set the delimiter to be Tab, since Tab is a non-printable character. I can’t type a character to represent it.

On Wed, Nov 1, 2023, at 7:22 PM, Lev Zakharov wrote:

Yes, sure. You can pass your custom delimiter via -d (or --delimiter) flag. You can run csv2md -h to see more information about the available options.

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[nickybpm]

After researching the matter, I've found it is indeed possible to specify a tab character as an argument on the command line.

For anyone else reading this, the required incantation is:

csv2md -d $'\t' myfile

I tested this in zsh, but I expect it should work in other shells too.

Thanks again for your attention, and a great tool.

[nickybpm]

I tested it and it works with bash as well as zsh. I've dropped a PR (#14) in case you'd like to add it to the docs.

[lzakharov]

Thanks for your research, really appreciate it! Your question is related to working on the command line in general and I've found this explanation useful too.