xsv table and double quotes in text fields

[sandman7920]

Is there any way to show double quotes as a single quote symbol

Test:

echo '1,"Test ""22"""'|xsv table -p 10

Result:

1           "Test ""22"""

Wanted:

1           Test "22"

[BurntSushi]

No. But this actually seems sensible to do.

[sandman7920]

table and flatten commands are human readable formatters.
Flatten format output data correct

table:

echo -en '"ID","TEXT"\n1,"Test ""22"""'|xsv table
ID  TEXT
1   "Test ""22"""

flatten:

echo -en '"ID","TEXT"\n1,"Test ""22"""'|xsv flatten
ID    1
TEXT  Test "22"

[sandman7920]

The basic idea is to do something like:

xsv table <filename|less -SN -#3

and then you can use less functionality (search, scroll, etc)

[BurntSushi]

Right. I get it. The reason why it doesn't work today is because xsv table is actually using a CSV writer to write the contents. I think that just needs to be changed to writing tab-delimited fields (which get auto-aligned by the underlying elastic tabstop writer).

[unhammer]

Similarly for fmt:

$ printf 'user\tutterance\njoe\tSay "hi"\n'
user    utterance
joe     Say "hi"

$ printf 'user\tutterance\njoe\tSay "hi"\n'|xsv select -d $'\t' utterance
utterance
"Say ""hi"""

$ printf 'user\tutterance\njoe\tSay "hi"\n'|xsv select -d $'\t' utterance|xsv fmt -t $'\t'
utterance
"Say ""hi"""

# Or even:
$ printf 'Say "hi"\n'|xsv fmt -d $'\t' -t $'\t'
"Say ""hi"""

Since tab-separated files don't tend to have double quotes like CSV's, it'd be nice to be able to strip them and simply get back

$ printf 'user\tutterance\njoe\tSay "hi"\n'|xsv select -d $'\t' utterance|xsv fmt -t $'\t'
utterance
Say "hi"

but since --quote requires a single ASCII character, there doesn't seem to be a way to do that:

$ printf 'user\tutterance\njoe\tSay "hi"\n'|xsv select -d $'\t' utterance|xsv fmt --quote $'\0' -t $'\t'
Could not convert '' to a single ASCII character.

[unhammer]

Oh, wait, this UNDOCUMENTED HACK seems to work for some reason:

$ printf 'user\tutterance\njoe\tSay "hi"\n'|xsv select -d $'\t' utterance|xsv fmt --quote $'\1' -t $'\t'
utterance
Say "hi"

and it's not in the output:

printf 'user\tutterance\njoe\tSay "hi"\n'|xsv select -d $'\t' utterance|xsv fmt --quote $'\1' -t $'\t' | grep -c $'\1'
0

[BurntSushi]

@unhammer Sorry, but that's completely unrelated to this issue. This issue is about xsv table, but you're talking about xsv fmt. Please open a new bug.