mattikl / tackle

Convert tabular data into another format

tackle

Convert tabular data into another format

Status: This project is not ready for mainstream use nor under active development. I'm using it to convert CSV into json or XLS, but I'm not developing it further unless I have a real use case for it.

Tips for working with tabular data or json in general:

• jq command-line tool is great (brew install jq)
• Python tablib library (pip install tablib)
• OpenOffice lets you select the character set when opening a CSV file

Idea

Getting data in spreadsheets that needs to be imported into a system is usually a tedious task. Tackle tries to make good guesses and point out inconsistencies. Most importantly, you can write your own readers and writers for the specific data and run them easily.

Developing

Set up virtualenv in tackle directory:

$ virtualenv env
$ source env/bin/activate
$ pip install --editable .

and you're ready to tackle:

$ tackle tests/data/test.csv -n foos

Examples

All examples can be found under the tests/data directory.

Convert a CSV file (utf-8 encoding) into an XLS spreadsheet:

$ tackle utf8.csv -t utf8.xls

Convert a CSV file (isolatin encoding) into an XLS spreadsheet:

$ tackle isolatin.csv --charset iso-8859-1 -t iso.xls

Plan

• Python 3 compliance (currently requires 2.7 due to the importlib import)
• support custom readers and writers
• idea: custom plugins in git
• tests
• travis.yml
• use chardet
  • also not to print binary data to stdout
• add --test to test parsing input
• add tackle-mgmt --testall to test all readers and writers with a test fixture